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Dragon Age causing heat concerns?

J

Johnnyredwine

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 28, 2009
14
0
I recently purchased a 17 inch MBP with 3.06ghz processor and 7200rpm 500gb HD ticked and fancied playing Dragon Age as i'm giving my old desktop computer away.

I installed windows 7 Ultimate (lost my XP CD), cranked the settings on Dragon Age to max, turned x4 AA on and set about from where I left off.

After about 30 minutes of playing I noticed my MBP was getting quite hot - not enough to burn me (though getting there) - just enough to cause concern and make me want to stop. I've had the temperature of this up to 90 degrees while doing other things and never felt it this hot before or had the fans going this much. I expected it to heat up and the fans to go somewhat crazy but not this much.

I'd like this laptop to last me at least a good few years so i'm wondering if daily prolong use of doing this could cause damage to the laptop?
 
If there was some way to tell the temperature of everything in Windows 7 like I can with iStat in Mac OS X then I might not be so worried as I understand the CPU can get quite hot without cause for concern.

Not being able to know the temperature and the fact it was getting close to burning me is what worried me and made me stop.
 
Johnnyredwine said:
If there was some way to tell the temperature of everything in Windows 7 like I can with iStat in Mac OS X then I might not be so worried as I understand the CPU can get quite hot without cause for concern.

Not being able to know the temperature and the fact it was getting close to burning me is what worried me and made me stop.
Click to expand...
HW Monitor is king. It should pull the axes information from the accelerometer as well.
 
I find that windows doesn't make the fans spin as much as they can. I use smcfancontrol in OS X and before I boot windows I put it to max fans at 6200 RPM, then I use bootcamp assistant to boot windows, that makes the fans stay at 6200 RPM. That means they run full speed at can keep the computer as cool as possible, since I don't use windows for other stuff then gaming the noise isn't that bad :)
 
Davidkoh said:
I find that windows doesn't make the fans spin as much as they can. I use smcfancontrol in OS X and before I boot windows I put it to max fans at 6200 RPM, then I use bootcamp assistant to boot windows, that makes the fans stay at 6200 RPM. That means they run full speed at can keep the computer as cool as possible, since I don't use windows for other stuff then gaming the noise isn't that bad :)
Click to expand...

I decided to give smcfancontrol a go as using HW Monitor showed my fans in Windows 7 weren't doing all that much but being new to Mac OS X I wasn't sure how to go about booting into windows via bootcamp assistant? All I got was the windows install/remove options.

Edit: Nevermind. A light bulb went off in my head and I restarted through Startup Disk which worked. I'm hoping this is the cause to my heat problems. Really want to play Dragon Age again without worrying.
 
Johnnyredwine said:
I'm hoping this is the cause to my heat problems. Really want to play Dragon Age again without worrying.
Click to expand...

Then you should have bought a 13" MBP and a desktop PC instead of a 17" MBP

Hate to break it to you but this game will always be an oven on your laptop even with the fans at 6k RPM
 
zw-gator said:
Then you should have bought a 13" MBP and a desktop PC instead of a 17" MBP

Hate to break it to you but this game will always be an oven on your laptop even with the fans at 6k RPM
Click to expand...

You're under the assumption I bought this laptop for the sole purpose of playing Dragon Age - I didn't - I just wanted to continue.

I'm also aware that running this would cause my laptop to become hot. I just wanted to know how much potential damage it could do as it just felt extremely hot before.

After running the fans at 6K RPM (and not actually being sure what the temperature was at the first time I ran this game) the temperature has stayed around 70-80 degrees.
 
Get some form of laptop cooler with the fans blowing towards where the CPU/GPU are located, it'll help a little at the very least.

I don't game much on mine but on occasion I do, its much more convenient than taking a desktop to a friend's house to play LAN games. And the laptop cooler helps enough that my laptop just stays fairly warm instead of hot to the touch when playing games on BootCamp.
 
Johnnyredwine said:
I decided to give smcfancontrol a go as using HW Monitor showed my fans in Windows 7 weren't doing all that much but being new to Mac OS X I wasn't sure how to go about booting into windows via bootcamp assistant? All I got was the windows install/remove options.

Edit: Nevermind. A light bulb went off in my head and I restarted through Startup Disk which worked. I'm hoping this is the cause to my heat problems. Really want to play Dragon Age again without worrying.
Click to expand...

Yeah sorry, I forgot that the startup disk isn't integrated in the OS X bootcamp assistant, it is in the windows one :p
 
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