ATI 3450M runs hot at weird times

Ever since upgrading from 32bit Vista to 64bit Win 7, I've noticed my GPU runs differently. Before, it would only heat up for gaming. It sits idle at .9V and during games it goes to 1V and gets hot, which makes sense. Now, when I upgraded to Windows 7, I made sure to use the latest CCC at the time and also made sure it was 64bit and Win 7 (I used the same release but the 32bit version for Vista just prior to installing Win 7 and never had any issues).

Driver version: 8.872.0.0

Now, it still idles at .9V, increases to 1V during gaming. However, it also increases to 1V when I open up Zune which I use exclusively for music and podcasts. Also, on HTML5 webpages, it increases to a record high 1.1V (on both IE9 and FF7). It doesn't make sense that it gets hot on Zune and for HTML5 rendering. Any recomendations?

 

Zune uses the GPU quite a bit for it's features (i.e, the soundwave bar at the bottom when music is playing).


I got worse battery life on my m11xR2 using the Zune player than any other media player, in addtion to that, simple browsing the internet was less power intensive...


I ended up just not using Zune on my laptop. I like it, but not enough to justify the battery life. Now, you can disable most of the "extra" animations in the Zune settings.

In addition, you can also disable GPU accelleration for IE9 and FF7. IE9 is in the settings (last settings tab, iirc), FF7 requires an about:flags key somewhere, I don't recall exactly what.

Have fun!

 

Ok, turned off hardware acceleration for Zune. Could careless about that. That fixed it from overheating. As for HTML5, turned off hardware acceleration in both browsers and benchmarked using MSFT's speed reading demo. With hardware it was 10 seconds. Without it, it took over 5 minutes which is crazy long. Testing the tron legacy HTML5 site, it just looked choppy. Also of note, the GPU of course didn't heat up but my CPU temp did increase significantly.

 

Yeah, but when your dGPU is a HD3450m, choices are limited (unless if you have switchable GPU, and avoiding the GMA950 - which draws about as much or more power than a HD3450m in the first place).

 

Yea, I think I'm going to keep hardware acceleration off on Zune and on in the internet browsers. HTML5 isn't common to run into while I do use Zune a lot and turning it off made a huge difference.

 

The benchmarks do not represent actual web sites so far, luckily. Maybe a few gallery demos (or actual galleries).

Though I don't know how HTML5 video is affected.

Have fun!

 

The only reason I was really getting worried was when my GPU went to 1.1V, it never increased to that even while gaming. However, it runs at 1V on HTML5. The time it clocked 1.1V was a few days ago when Microsoft had an HTML5 video for Bing's homepage image.

 

How hot is "hot"?