Laptop cooling Questions

TokiToki · October 23, 2018

So so so so so, I own a saucy MSI GE72mVR 7RG Laptop, beautiful piece of kit and its serving me well... for the most part.

Since i purchase said laptop i have notice that the Temps have always been really damn high, im talking 48C idle and 95C Under Load. At first i thought this a huge mistake (never owned a powerful laptop) And i googled it and found on the Intel and Nvidia websites that CPUs and GPUs will operate stable up to 110C. So i was like "okay so maybe MSI just speced the temps up to that level as its under the Intel and NVID temp maxes." I later found from seeing videos of "normal laptops" that this is a GROSS Over heating problem, though its within perimeters of the Intel website, its not really Temps you want to see in your laptop as its cooking itself. I have also notice that the heat is causing my laptops screen to Literally come unglued and Warp upwards, if i close it before its cooled down (which i have RIP screen).

To reduce the damage of the heat issues i have done the following to reduce temperatures:

Undervolted CPU by 120mV Stable
Underclocked GPU by 350Mhz core and 450Mhz Memory
Now have it on Laptop stand with fan
Have changed the powerplan to adaptive for Nvidia and maximum state of CPU in high performance to be 99% not 100 and Min of 50%

after all of these "fixes" which for a laptop under 7 months old i think is ridiculous i have to do, i have managed to drop the temps to 90C under full extended load with minimal FPS loss. I am still salty that i even have to do this and one of my friends laptop (which is the same just 1050ti instead of 1070 (non MaxQ)) sometimes has gpu IDLEs of nothing as it turns off! and under load they would see maybe 60C on cpu and gpu. For a laptop that is the same design, same heat pipes and same overall volumetric flow rate i am befuddled as to how this is such an issue for me.

Needless to say i am sending it off to MSI to have it looked at as the screen will need to be replaced as this is ridiculous, But my overall question is, Are these temps for my laptop TOO high?! Should they be lower out of the box or is this a common or normal Heat level?!

Also if you have any other nifty tricks maybe a setting that deactivates my GPU when not in use that'd be nice.

And no im not going to do a jank ass Linus Cooling solution!

Thanks for reading and plz save my bacon! I dont like being able to cook my bacon on my laptop.

Ross Siggers · October 23, 2018

The load temperature is a tad high. You don't mention if it thermal throttles itself but at a guess I'd say it would be.

The idle temperature isn't the worst for a laptop though. most laptops are in the 40's if you're doing light tasks like web browsing, default fan curves are tuned towards acoustics at that level.

TokiToki · October 23, 2018

5 minutes ago, Ross Siggers said:

The load temperature is a tad high. You don't mention if it thermal throttles itself but at a guess I'd say it would be.

The idle temperature isn't the worst for a laptop though. most laptops are in the 40's if you're doing light tasks like web browsing, default fan curves are tuned towards acoustics at that level.

I dont think it throttles no, but heat is the main cause of premature death of components so was curious, and bare in mind those temps are not even 50% load.

D13H4RD · October 23, 2018

Have you attempted a repaste?

Many laptops come with thermal paste that are pretty shoddily applied from the factory owing to speedy applications, and they also tend to not be very good. Some laptops even have thermal paste that's extremely dry.

When it comes back, I'd recommend using rubbing alcohol to rub off all the stock paste, then reapply better thermal paste like Thermal Grizzly's Kyronaut (Conductonaut tends to do better but it's very risky and usually doesn't do that much of a better job than Kyronaut). Depending on how bad the stock paste is, you will either see a slight improvement or a significant one.