Y500 SLI 650m, heat venting from only one side normal?

Purchased a Y500 recently with the dual 650m option and had a few concerns after using it for about a month. It's a great system, but when gaming and actually using the video card(s) the heat vents from the left side only (my left, facing the computer). The right-side ultra bay has a heat sink and similar vent setup but no air seems to circulate to or from that side of the system. After using for awhile and checking the dust buildup, it seems like the left side is collecting all the dust (based on checking underneath) while the right side has none. So my concerns are:

1. Does this mean only one bay is working/functional?

2. Are there overheating concerns if both sides ARE working but the right side doesn't have a fan?

3. How can I check to ensure that both cards are actually being utilized (both show on the Device Manager)?

Hopefully this was thorough enough to give one of ya'll an idea of what I'm looking at, maybe that's just the design of the notebook...

 

1. Do the games you play support SLI?

2. The CPU+GPU exhaust comes from one vent, whereas the 2nd GPU exhaust is going through the second

3. Have you configured SLI?

 

Wow...had no idea that SLI was something that I'd have to enable myself, figured it'd be more of a plug-and-play kinda thing, I might've gone the entire life of this notebook not knowing that I wasn't even using the 2nd video card if I hadn't asked here lol. Sure enough SLI was not enabled, started it up following some online tutorials and BAM, hot air venting on my mouse hand lol. Thanks!

I'll have to dig deeper later, now that it's actually working I was kinda expecting a huge performance boost but I don't see one just yet, maybe some additional tweaking is in order...

 

What games do you play? SLI should provide a very noticeable performance gain in demanding titles.

The left side fan will build up dust faster than the Ultrabay one because it is much more powerful and has to cool both the CPU and first GPU.

The right side still gets quite toasty though. The hot air burned my mouse hand the other day while playing Metro 2033. My thumb and index finger were red after the session. I am running a 42% overclock though so there is extra heat output, plus it was like 90F in my room since it's on the south side of the house right above the garage. I'd recommend keeping your mouse hand away from the front of the vent if you can, maybe get a cooling pad to elevate it so that it blows the air over your hand, or use an external keyboard and mouse away from the general vicinity of the laptop.

 

So far I've only tried it with WoW enabled. I played Darksiders II and Deadpool from beginning to end on just the one enabled card and it was at max settings, several other games were also auto set to High or Ultra and ran pretty well lol...I'll mess around and report back later.