alternative to laptop cooling! i need help!

[stev0]

being at school, i've been banished to a laptop for my gaming needs. all goes well for the first 30 min or so, but as soon as the graphics card (ati mobility 7500) heats up, my fps drops to 35 or so... anything i can do to help? http://www.sagernotebook.com/pages/notebooks/product.cfm?ProductType=8882 that is the laptop that i'm currently using. it does have a number of fans, but they seem to go on and off, when they are on it does make a large difference... any suggestions?

 

[mechBgon]

If you can devise a way to feed it a stream of cool air, that might help. Maybe a small desk fan blowing across the case from the side...?

 

[stev0]

i've got some fans laying around... i'm going to see what i can rig up while i'm at home today.

 

[stev0]

putting a fan next to the computer dosen't seem to help that much, anyone else have some suggestions?

 

[mechBgon]

What do you think of this dealiebob? Or this one?

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
What do you think of this dealiebob? Or this one?

Was going to suggest that flat one, but that PCMCIA slot cooler is really nifty too.
Maybe laptops should feature some sort of fold-out cooling - once you're all situated with it on your lap or desk, wherever, just flip out the fans, and away they go. I had a P2 400 laptop with a 4MB "AGP"

chip and a 4GB HD, I think it was around 4200rpms; it had one small fan to cool the processor. Even something like that got pretty darn toasty to be sitting on your lap; I always needed a book or something to insulate my legs from it. The wrist rest/touchpad area never got hot though; don't think there were many components under that.
Now they keep pushing more powerful components into laptops, which keep pouring out heat. Surf the Internet, play games, and fry eggs - all on your new laptop!

 

[stev0]

Originally posted by: Jeff7

Originally posted by: mechBgon
What do you think of this dealiebob? Or this one?

Was going to suggest that flat one, but that PCMCIA slot cooler is really nifty too.
Maybe laptops should feature some sort of fold-out cooling - once you're all situated with it on your lap or desk, wherever, just flip out the fans, and away they go. I had a P2 400 laptop with a 4MB "AGP"

chip and a 4GB HD, I think it was around 4200rpms; it had one small fan to cool the processor. Even something like that got pretty darn toasty to be sitting on your lap; I always needed a book or something to insulate my legs from it. The wrist rest/touchpad area never got hot though; don't think there were many components under that.
Now they keep pushing more powerful components into laptops, which keep pouring out heat. Surf the Internet, play games, and fry eggs - all on your new laptop!

fry eggs is right! ... i'm going to look into that flat cooler... the pc card cooler would be pretty spiffy but i've got a orinoco gold card in one of the slots... and that cooler probably wouldn't fit below it (or vise versa)... thanks for the advise guys!

 

[bizmark]

If you don't mind taking your laptop apart then you can do some pretty effective cooling for times when you're gaming. It's really easy to lift out the keyboard on my Compaq.... loosen a few screws and then you've got the CPU heatspreader right in front of you. If I did significant gaming on it, I'd just detach the keyboard for the duration of my game-time and use an external keyboard and mouse, while using some sort of desk fan blowing directly across the heatspreader.

I've heard that those PCMCIA slot coolers worked fairly well. Just anything to get airflow in your case.

 

[FenrisUlf]

The USB port on my laptop used to crap out after about a half hour from overheating. I "solved" the problem by putting something under the corners of it to raise it up about 3/4" off the desk. Now the heat is no longer trapped by the desk and it runs much cooler. The fan rarely comes on anymore (and I run F@H 24/7) and the USB hasn't gone out in at least 6 months. It also works if I prop up just the back - anything to get the hot air out from under it. An additional fan would probably be even more helpful. If you're really feeling froggy, you might try to take it apart - mine didn't have a very good application of thermal grease between the chipsets and heatsinks.

 

[Ginta]

I saw this one a the local Fry's a few days ago. I have the flat plastic model mentioned earlier and although it's fairly quiet (compared to the notebook fans) it still can't cool all that well. The metal model looks better in that it's raised the up higher and the fans look like they can push more air.

Other thing you can do to cool your system is (if you have modular drives) remove any drives you don't need, such as your floppy and cdrom, as well as the battery since you most likely will be using the AC. My dvdrom on my P3-850 traps alot of heat in the system so removing it when gaming helps ventilation.