It’s frequently updated, supports the latest desktop and mobile GPUs and you can get the latest version (Installer/Portable) from their official site: There are many free utilities that allow you to keep track of the hundreds of sensor readings from your motherboard and chips (such as HWiNFO, HWMonitor, libreHardwareMonitor, CoreTemp) but we’ll stick with HWiNFO for illustration purposes in this guide. The tools: Check temperatures and evaluate performance Over the course of many gaming sessions, overheat can and will reduce the lifespan of your battery and laptop components and may cause permanent damage!įor this reason we deem it important to assess the status of the internal cooling system, tweak the settings in order to obtain the maximum performance while mantaining “ safer” temperatures and giving the best possible external cooling aid. While RGB rims 🌈 and fancy keyboard backlight are nice to have, they are not ( as) necessary to enjoy your games with high FPS and performance so they are not a defining feature for this kind of laptop!Ĭommon issues that can arise due to overheat over the course of the gaming session are performance degradation, frequent stutters or crashes, occasional scalding if you touch the wrong zone on your laptop at the wrong time! The latest generation of laptops brought us more and more AMD-powered gaming laptops, but due to the different terminology (PL1 → SPL, PL2 → SPPT, etc), inner workings (boosting algorithms, undervolting behaviour), and tools used this guide will be mostly focused on Intel machines, with a follow-up guide focusing on AMD. This article is going to focus on a specific laptop category, which we dear the most:Īny laptop you can run a game on may fall in this category, but in order to make the distinction somehow clearer we’ll only refer to those machines with higher powered CPU variants (excluding Y and U variants for Intel, and U variants for AMD) and a discrete graphics card (dGPU).

There are models for every need, ranging from ultra-thin laptops or convertibles to mighty desktop replacements.Īll of them have a thing in common: they are thermally constrained by the dimensions of their internal cooling elements. Modern laptops are very powerful machines and they often pack quite a punch in an extremely compact chassis. How to reduce temperatures and increase performance for gaming laptops

Quick cpu default settings