My Gateway P-6831FX laptop keeps shutting off while gaming

First few months it worked fine while gaming and never shut off, i played games like crysis and cod world at war.

now after i play any game for about 5-10 minutes it shuts off without warning, i purchased a cooling fan pad when i first got my laptop and always used it while playing games.

From what iv read it sounds like i have a overheating, but i have a cooling pad, is it not enough?

 

Have you tried cleaning possible dust from the vents?

 

Is it abruptly shutting down or shutting down with windows? Is this happening both on AC and battery?

It sounds like a CPU or GPU overheat, try using some can air to clean out the vents on the bottom. Also google HWMonitor, download the program and run it. This will tell you your system temps. For reference your GPU shouldnt go above 90 C really, and CPU shouldnt go above 80 C in most cases. If they are still spiking way high after you clean the vents you may need to apply new thermal compund, there is a guide for that but make sure that is the issue first.

 

the computer is abruptly shutting completely off, i always keep my battery in and ac plugged in,

i downloaded and used the HWmonitor while playing grandtheft auto 4 and the last i checked it before my computer shutoff my gpu was at 100 degrees celcious and my cores were in the 80s

 

i was able to unscrew and uncover the heat sink and fan, there wasnt really any dust in there, but to get to the gpu fan i got take like the computer apart and im not sure i wanna risk messing things up doing that

 

make sure your gpu fan is running. mine went out a few months ago.

 

fan works i think, i can hear it and definitely feel the hot air coming out

 

Ok try undervoltiong your CPU, that will take the load off the cooling system, there is a guide in the hardware forum.

 

No no no, you dont need to undervolt your CPU. Hey may think the CPU and GPU are using the same fan but they are not. It sounds like your thermal compound on your GPU is finished, I know you dont want to hear it but you are going to have to disassemble down to the GPU and re apply thermal paste to the heat sink. It would also be a good idea to clean the fan much as you can. 100 C is what is shutting your system down, it is keeping your GPU from burning up. I want to warn you however this may not fix the issue if there is already something internally wrong with your GPU but it dosent sound like there is.

 

Sorry I forgot. But his cores can be much cooler than the 80s.

 

alright thanks, i didnt know there was two heat sinks, does the gpu use the same kind of thermal paste as the cpu?

 

well the problem with redoing the GPU is you have to take the whole friggen laptop apart, but yes they do use the same thermal paste.

 

Yeah you can use AS5 or whatever on your GPU as well, but as stated before your gonna have to take the lappy apart. There is a sticky guide on the first page of the gateway thread. I would recommend however if you are going through all the trouble of doing this to get some of that ICD7. Its a thicker compound that can replace the thermal pads that are used on the memory of the GPU, but you can just as easily leave the pads inplace if you want.

 

Those are REALLY high temperatures dude. My 6860 runs the GPU at 74c and the cores at just over 50c non-undervolted. Under full gaming load that is, they're much lower at idle.

Heat is obviously your problem here. The first thing you need to do is use a can of air to spray out the fans and vents for both. There's another recent post about someone with really high temps who thought he'd cleaned them out and so was looking for other advice, but when he used a can of air he got a ton of dust out and that fixed his heat problems completely.

 

alright thanks, ill take it apart and apply new thermal paste and i guess i should give the cpu new paste too while im at it,..whats the difference between thermal paste and thermal grease because im gonna go to best buy to get it and they have both