my T61 GPU overheated

dang, got 3 times BSOD this evening just after I figured out the performance increase when I'm not using the Windows page file ....

all happened when I'was playing my C&C Tiberium Wars Kane Ed. at 1400x1050 with max details. So withing 3 hours it did it 3 times, all with error in the video driver file: nv4_disp.dll

I updated with the latest lenovo drivers v. 156.85 like 2 days ago.

thinking about the problem, I put my hand over the left side of the laptops keyboard, and it was quite hot Well, I shut down the game for 5 min and it cooled itself, but come on now .. I can't have that

so is tpfancontrol my best option here ?

 

I wonder if these two are related http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=215611

 

well they both emerged from one source - the game, lol

anyways, I found tpfancontrol v25 or so, and will see how it works

 

Judging heat by your hand is not very accurate.

Consider this:

The human body temp is 98.6 F
The Laptop body temp is 100-180 F

They are built to be hot by human standards. To know whether it is getting too hot you need to monitor the temp and see what it is getting too. I believe the critical threshold (where the system will try to shut down) is 212 F. The GPU typically runs 10-20 degrees hotter than the regular system temp. (atleast on mine).

That being said, if I touch the rear of my laptop while gaming it feels hot, but looking at the temp it is well within range.

As for a blue screen of death - typically overheating does not give you a BSOD, it gives you instant power off, no messages at all. BSOD is a driver/software problem, which could very likely be caused by out of memory. 2GB RAM is pretty light if you have no pagefile, take into account your graphics card will share a portion, and windows typically uses 300-400MB (total), and you are left with anywhere from 1GB-1.3GB free memory for everything else. I know several games that will actively use 2GB.

 

The heat can be from your RAM possibly, since it's taking most of the load now with no paging file.

 

the way it happened was that the game will stop (for ~3 sec), then half of my units/bildings will clear out from the map (1-2 sec), then BSOD.

Otter, thank you for your reply. If overheating doesn't cause BSOD then the problem is with not having enough memory. Could the video driver expand the shared video memory during gaming ?? .. cause I've checked couple of times and the game shows ~650MB usage, so windows + game = ~1.05GB usage

 

Re-enable page file and see if it goes away - this is an obvious first step, since the problem started when you disabled it. If it works, then the problem is exactly what you were warned about in the other thread - disabling the page file means that something crashes when you run out of RAM!

 

Three things:

#1 Before you complain about heat, blow out the fan with a can of compressed air. You could have a huge dust bunny in there...

#2 You can never really judge if something is "too hot" with your hand. I have an original Intel Macbook Pro for work, and there have been times that thing gets "skin peeling off my hand" level of hot and it never crashed.

#3 Time to turn that swap file back on... This should be obvious and the first thing you tried. You turned off the swap file which was warned against, you then have a problem with apps crashing, and you blame your videocard for overheating? Say what?

#3a Your video card may be using a portion of system RAM as a cache for itself, and this may not always be apparent when looking at the Task Manager commit charge.

 

thank you for your replies.

one thing is for sure: I'm not turning that page file back on. I'd rather buy more memory since it's so cheap these days.

but I'll try the game with the page file just to confirm the problem.

 

Just Curious why did you turn it off and not want to turn it back on?

I Play CNC3 and it works fine, i have everything maxxed except FX and shader.

 

^ performance increased noticeablly with no page file. How much memory do you see available with 4GB installed and XP Pro ??

anyways, yesterday I played for 4.5 hours with no page file, and it worked fine ... duh ... The only difference was that I removed that paper sheet that used to sit on my laptop keyboard (I use it as a dust cover since my laptop sits open all the time). Well, damn, I don't know ... ram or heat issue ?!?!

I'll keep testing it I guess