Is the age of my CPU making my laptop overheat while streaming YouTube videos in Chrome?

[LeeRoy88]

My current laptop (Early 2015 13" MacBook Pro with an i5-5257U and 8GB of RAM) tends to heat up a lot while streaming YouTube videos at 1080p or higher (and occasionally on lower resolutions) in Chrome and the fans get really loud. I figured this might be due to the age of the CPU in the machine.

Does anyone have a newer laptop (preferably one with a 10th generation Intel CPU as I'm considering purchasing a laptop with one of those) and if so, do you experience loud fans/high temperatures while streaming 1080p or higher YouTube videos in Chrome?

[Helpful Tech Witch]

27 minutes ago, LeeRoy88 said:

(Early 2015 13" MacBook Pro

theres your problem

/s

 

[mariushm]

It's dust in the fins of the heatsinks ... maybe degraded thermal paste (by this point whatever paste is there is not doing any good).

 

It's probably also lack of hardware decoder for VP9 codec in your video card, so the browser has to use cpu to decode the video, most likely. 

There's an extension h264ify or something like that, which will force Youtube to only serve h264 encoded videos which your video card should be able to decode. Downside is that Youtube only serves up to 720p encoded with h264, so you wouldn't be able to select 1080p.  I'd argue for most content, you don't really need more than 720p especially on a 13-14" screen.

 

[aisle9]

The age of your CPU contributes less to thermals than the state of your laptop does. Open it up, use compressed air to dust it out, and it's probably well past time for a thermal paste replacement.

[LeeRoy88]

Thanks for the advice. I'll be trying these suggestions but I need to obtain the relevant tools/equipment first.

I'll let you guys know how it goes

[LeeRoy88]

Update: I have blown out the dust from my laptop and replaced the thermal paste but still getting loud fans while streaming videos in YouTube.

 

I suspect mariushm has a point about my CPU having to decode the VP9 codec (I don't have dedicated graphics on this laptop, so the CPU is doing everything anyway).