Managing your Laptop Temperatures

[diblob]

I recently purchased a Defiance III 17.3, Intel 7700HQ Laptop and as some of you may be aware, some of these new Clevo style laptops that PCSpecialist supply do not have the best CPU cooling. The Laptop is great on the whole, but CPU temperatures during gaming can get in the uncomfortably toasty range of 80-90°C and above. GPU temperatures don't seem quite as bad, but they can still get pretty hot depending on what game you are running. For some (including me) this can be a big issue, and could shorten the life of your laptop, or at the worst make it malfunction, crash or break.

Instead of whining about this, I'm going to provide a few tips, technical and non-technical that could help you tame your CPU/GPU temps. This guide is for Clevo chassis laptop models from PCSpecialist, but many tips will also apply to all laptops. I have found much of this advice on other threads in this forum, and on other websites, and have popped them all together in this thread so it's all in one place for your convenience.

1) Simple tip no.1 is to make sure you are placing your laptop on a hard surface so that air can circulate underneath the chassis. Placing your laptop on your bed or the carpet could restrict airflow and make the laptop overheat.

2) Play in a well ventilated room with a comfortable ambient temperature. If your bedroom is 30°C on a hot summers day with all your windows closed, your laptop is already at a disadvantage. Even placing a desk fan directed at your laptop could help the airflow, but if the room is too hot, all the fan will do is blow hot air around. Be a cool gamer!

3) Monitor your temperatures! You should always know what temperatures your laptop is running at when gaming. You can use a variety of software to do this. I use MSI Afterburner for its in-game overlay that shows you CPU and GPU temps whilst you are playing your game. Install MSI Afterburner from their website, and when you have opened it, press the setting icon (cog wheel). Under the 'On-Screen Display' tab, make sure you are aware of the toggle button combo, so you can enable or disable it in game at any time. Under the 'Monitoring' tab, you can control what information will be displayed on your in-game overlay. To do this, you can scroll down the list and highlight a line you wish to see displayed, then tick the box below that says 'Show in On-Screen Display'. This should add a little note on the list next to that line that says 'in OSD'. I like to see GPU1 Temperature, Framerate, CPU1,2,3,4 temperature. Once you have done this, play your game, and activate the on-screen display by pressing button combo you saw earlier. There you go! A nice handy OSD that can keep you informed of your temperatures whilst gaming. There are many other ways of monitoring temperatures, but MSI allows you to do it perfectly in-game, without alt-tabbing out to see information in another window like other software.

4) Clevo model laptops use software called 'Clevo Control Centre' or 'CCC', also known by some as 'Hotkey'. I'll preface this tip by saying that CCC is a total mess of a bit of software, with terrible design and limited usefulness. It is bloated with large windows and unintuitive options. With this software installed as standard, and supplied with your laptop, you can control your laptop fans to a certain extent. The software should always be running in the background and you can check it by looking at the bottom right of your taskbar in windows to see if the icon is there. Pressing Fn+1 will put your fans at maximum speed, increasing cooling (and also the noise!). Pressing Fn+1 again should revert the fans back to automatic. This is a quick and simple way to boost cooling with minimal effort when needed.

5) CCC has a few more options that can affect fans and temperatures, but it is not very informative or intuitive as to what options do what actions. Open CCC by double clicking the icon in the taskbar. Ignore the 4 big icons at the top for now, and look at the three tabs just below that. 'System Program' is the useful one. Here you can change the fan speed in a very limited way. 'Maximum' is the same as pressing Fn+1 to get the fans buzzing lots! 'Automatic' is the same as pressing Fn+1 again and reverting back to auto. 'Overclock' I have no idea about. I have used this option on occasion, but my temperatures seem to be higher than when I leave it on automatic. 'Custom' lacks options of much use. It seems you can set what temp the fans start or stop, and also the full fan speed. Start and stop should be left around the 50°C mark, best to just leave these at default. Max Fan speed only goes up to 80% for some reason, so that what I leave it on. Moving back to the 'System Program' tab, you have Power Conservation modes. These modes should be tied in to the two main power modes that you can see in Windows power options. 'Performance' and 'Balance'. 'Performance' should be the standard when you are gaming and running plugged into main power. If you click 'Power Saving' the laptop screen should lower brightness, and your CPU will downclock to a lower frequency. On my Intel 7700HQ, the performance CPU speed is 2.8Ghz plus boost clock up to around 3.5Ghz. When I click on Power saving, the CPU speed goes down to 1.6-1.7Ghz. I would only use this option when running low on battery.

6) MSI afterburner which I mentioned earlier also has a function that can limit framerates in game (if the game already doesn't have this option). If your CPU and GPU are kicking out a game at 120FPS, it's a bit of a waste of time as your eyes can't really perceive much past 60FPS. Why have your CPU and GPU working overtime on frames that aren't really needed? Follow the guide at point 3, and enable on screen display to show framerates in game. With MSI Afterburner running, you should see an icon in your windows taskbar called 'MSI On-Screen Display Server' or maybe 'RivaTuner Statistics Server'. Click on that icon to open up the stat server window. You should see an option for 'Framerate Limit' which you can simply adjust by clicking up or down on the arrows next to it. 60 should be all you need, but you may even want it lower so just set it to whatever you want. I use 40fps most of the time, which is all I need for my eyes to see a smooth enough gaming experience. In fast paced online games, you may want to to keep it up at 60 though. You should see that your changes are working by just looking at the MSI on-screen display whilst you are gaming.

Continued in Post #2

 

[diblob]

Continued from Post #1

7) Lower your CPU clock speed. This can be done in a variety of software apps, but to be honest none of them are needed at all when you can change your Clock Speed within windows itself! Oh yes. Before we do this however, we could do with a bit of software that can show you your clock speeds, so you can actively monitor any changes you are making. You can do this using the crappy Clevo Control Centre CPU tool, but I prefer to monitor my CPU Frequencies by using CPUID HWMonitor. This can be downloaded for free from the CPUID website, and is a well renowned and reliable tool. Install this, and open it, and scroll down the list so you can see the 'Clocks' listing. This shows you CPU Cores and their Current/Min/Max Frequencies. Note your current rate (my Intel 7700HQ runs at default of around 2.8Ghz, 3.5Ghz when boosted in games). Now you have that open, go to Control Panel, Power Options, and click on 'Change Plan Settings' next to the active power plan being used. Click on 'Change advanced Power Settings and scroll down to 'Processor power management'. Click the + sign next to Minimum Processor state and set this to around 10% (I am changing my options on the 'Plugged in' state and not the 'On Battery', as I only use my laptop plugged in). This will adjust the the lowest frequency your CPU will run at, so don't worry to much about this as it will be the Max State that we will be dealing with mostly.
Scroll down a bit further and click the + sign next to 'Maximum processor state'. This is where things get interesting. If your CPU is boosting up to max speed and getting too hot, you can adjust the max power state below 100% and lower your CPU clock speed by doing so. Note your CPU speed in CPUID, and then in the power options window lower the Max State by 5% then click apply. See if your clock speed lowers. If not, try lowering it by another 5% until you see the clock speed get to the amount you require. The adjustments vary from CPU to CPU, so on mine for example, I can set it to 95% max, and that effectively disables the boost clock and keep my CPU at about 2.8Ghz. Lowering the state to 80% and my CPU runs at 2.2Ghz. Experiment a little and keep monitoring the clock speed in your CPUID to see how your changes are working.
I have found this is the MOST EFFECTIVE way of throttling my CPU temperatures on my laptop. I can run Witcher 3, Batman Arkham Knight and such, at high detail 1920x1080 res, and only be using my CPU at 2.2Ghz, well below it's max.

8) Lower your GPU clock speed. If your GPU is the one getting too toasty, you can effectively downclock it to reduce temperatures (and also reduce it's performance unfortunately). You can do this on PCSpecialist Clevo style laptops using Clevo Control Centre, and on other laptops using software such as MSI Afterburner. Using CCC, click on the 'Gaming' Tab and open the GPU Overclock window. By default it should be set to GPU Overclock 'Off' and the bars below it should be greyed out and inaccessible. Just click next to 'On' and the bars below should light up. You can click on these bars to lower the GPU Clock and also the GPU Memory speed. This will reduce performance in games, but also reduce temps also. You can change settings here, and monitor how your temp is doing in game using the MSI Afterburner on screen display.

9) Clean/Dust your laptop. DO NOT ATTEMPT IF YOU ARE UNCOMFORTABLE WITH DOING THIS. Your laptop will be sucking in air, and blowing it out of the vents, pulling in all sorts of dust that accumulate inside over a period of time. When your laptop gets clogged up with dust on the fans and the heatsinks inside, the airflow is reduced and the cooling is compromised. I am not going to go into too much detail here as you can watch guides on this on youtube. Just look up 'Clevo Laptop Clean' or something like that and you can watch how to remove the bottom panel of your laptop to expose the inside for easy cleaning with an airduster. Remove dust, improve airflow, improve cooling. Ta daaa!

10) Re apply TIM (Thermal Interface Material) on your CPU. DO NOT ATTEMPT IF YOU ARE UNCOMFORTABLE WITH DOING THIS, as it is a technical job that requires some skill and finesse. There is a small layer of conductive paste that sits between your CPU and the Heatsink. Over time, this paste can dry out due to high temperatures, and become less effective and conducting heat to the heatsink. Most tech-savvy users will change the TIM paste once or twice a year. You can do this more often if you are capable and comfy with this more technical job. You will need a tube of thermal compound such as Artic MX-4 or Thermal Grizzly (My Fave), as well as some thermal grease remover. Again, I'm not going to fully explain this in this guide, as youtube is your best friend here. Just search 'Clevo Repaste' and you should find an appropriate vid that can help you. Do this every few months or so, and each time you do you should hopefully see a marked reduction in CPU temperatures (providing you have done the job right!)

Okay, that's all I can think of for now. I hope this guide is of use to some of you with Toasty laptops like me. As a final point, please do not attempt any of the technical hardware jobs unless you are fully confident and capable of doing them. Messing around inside the laptop isn't for noobs, and you can damage your laptop and void warranties.

For the record, I am running the following spec:

Defiance III series 17.3"
Intel Core i7 7700hq (with Arctic MX-4 thermal paste)
16GB Corsair Vengeance 2400Mhz
Geforce 1060 6Gb
240Gb Kingston M2 ssd
480Gb Kingston ssd
Win 10

 

[keynes]

but CPU temperatures during gaming can get in the uncomfortably toasty range of 80-90°C and above

7) Lower your CPU clock speed

If that's the case then I would send it back to be checked. While lowering the CPU clock speed would help, it is not a solution and it shouldn't go that high during gaming.

 

[diblob]

If that's the case then I would send it back to be checked. While lowering the CPU clock speed would help, it is not a solution and it shouldn't go that high during gaming.

I agree, I am not particularly comfortable with the 80-90° range. I would love to know if anyone else has a similar or identical spec laptop to my one posted above, that could do a comparable gaming test to compare results. I have read much about this Clevo model and it seems it is a simply not good at CPU cooling, and have even read responses on some forums from PCSpecialist themselves saying that 80°+ is the norm. It seems there is not much you can do other than repaste with a better TIM and hope you get improved temps. I can do that myself, so I probably won't send the laptop back to PCS for now. I don't think it's the fault of PCS, it's a cooling inadequacy in some Clevo models that PCS cannot rectify.

If I play a game like No Man's Sky for example, I'll get temps of about 60-70° which is quite acceptable. As soon as I fire up Batman Arkham Knight or Witcher 3, the CPU temps creep up way past 80° in no time.

 

[Oussebon]

Over 80 degrees on the CPU when it's only sharing a chassis with a 1060 doesn't sound entirely normal.

 

[keynes]

I agree, I am not particularly comfortable with the 80-90° range. I would love to know if anyone else has a similar or identical spec laptop to my one posted above, that could do a comparable gaming test to compare results. I have read much about this Clevo model and it seems it is a simply not good at CPU cooling, and have even read responses on some forums from PCSpecialist themselves saying that 80°+ is the norm. It seems there is not much you can do other than repaste with a better TIM and hope you get improved temps. I can do that myself, so I probably won't send the laptop back to PCS for now. I don't think it's the fault of PCS, it's a cooling inadequacy in some Clevo models that PCS cannot rectify.

If I play a game like No Man's Sky for example, I'll get temps of about 60-70° which is quite acceptable. As soon as I fire up Batman Arkham Knight or Witcher 3, the CPU temps creep up way past 80° in no time.

I wouldn't be comfortable with those temps. Not sure on whether is consistent or not with the clevo chassis. While I have seen a few reviews indicating it shouldn't be the norm and it could indicate something wrong with your particular chassis.

 

[Jmdhainsworth]

i got the defiance 3 with 7700hq and 1070 and to start was getting bluescreens constantly, ended up being the cpu temp so now i run with max fans and undervolted the cpu and it runs alot better only hitting 90 at full load but limiting fps brings it down to like 45c

 

[Oussebon]

I have to say those temps don't sound normal for a Defiance III with a mobile CPU. I'd be tempted to contact PCS about them under the warranty.