Have you ever thought about why your laptop keeps overheating while gaming? Gaming laptops are portable, small, and packed with FPS-boosting power, allowing you to compete in your favourite virtual environments. And you can do it without having to sit at a desk. You can take your gaming setup with you everywhere you go without feeling like you’re carrying a power brick.
Overheating may cause a slew of issues, including stuttering, thermal throttling, and hardware damage. These issues will undoubtedly degrade your gaming experience and reduce the lifespan of your laptop.
Remove dust, cancel unnecessary background jobs, update drivers, and decrease your in-game settings to keep your laptop from overheating when gaming. Always place your laptop on a firm surface with adequate airflow. Revert to default if you’ve enabled overclocking on your laptop.
Why Is Your Laptop Overheating While Gaming?
Long periods of gaming lead the laptop’s CPUs and graphics cards to work overtime. This, in turn, produces a lot of heat! If the laptop lacks enough cooling, it will be unable to resist excessive heat. This is true regardless of whether the cause is a poorly constructed internal cooling system or external forces. External influences might range from blocked fans to using the laptop on soft surfaces.
Thermal throttling is one of the first indicators of a laptop overheating while gaming for many people. Not only that, but overheating may cause FPS drops, stuttering, and an uncomfortably hot chassis. Dedicated tools such as Core Temp and HWMonitor may be used to monitor the temperature of your laptop’s internal components.
How to Stop a Laptop From Overheating While Gaming: Common Fixes
Get Rid of the Dust
Dust is by far the most prevalent cause of overheating problems. Dust accumulates and clogs a laptop’s air intake vents and internal fans over time, eventually causing heated air to become trapped within. You may simply remove dust with compressed air, but first, verify the warranty on your laptop. Some warranties are voided if the chassis is opened without the manufacturer’s help.
Unnecessary background tasks and programs should be closed.
Before beginning a gaming session, always close any unneeded activities and programs. The more resource-intensive apps and tasks you have open, the higher the stress on your laptop, which means more heat is created. Even if you haven’t opened any other programs or tasks, many runs in the background automatically.
- Ctrl + Shift + Esc will bring up the Task Manager.
- To organize programs by CPU usage, go to the “Processes” tab and click on the CPU column.
- Stop any unnecessary programs or tasks that are using a lot of CPU power.
- Repeat the process with the “Memory” tab to identify (and disable) unnecessary ram-hungry applications.
Update Drivers
Another common reason of a laptop overheating while gaming is out-of-date drivers. Updates repair broken data, protect you from viruses, and keep your laptop running efficiently. Updates frequently feature critical bug fixes and techniques to improve performance.
Here’s how to see whether your laptop’s drivers need to be updated:
- Open the settings by clicking on the Windows Taskbar Start button.
- Navigate to “Update & Security” and then “Windows Update.”
- Select “Check for updates” from the menu.
- Now, if applicable, select “view optional updates” and navigate to the “driver updates” section.
Change In-Game Settings
We all enjoy playing games in the most visually appealing environments. Unfortunately, you must prioritise the demands of your laptop. Especially if it cannot handle the high demand caused by gaming. Otherwise, you’ll literally be “burning” it down.
Almost every current game allows you to change the settings to improve performance. Change the in-game graphics to the lowest setting and disable any additional effects. Turn off “screen shake” and “anti-aliasing” if possible. Check that the frame rate cap and resolution are also compatible with your monitor.
