Am I hurting my laptop?

I have a question. I wanted to see what my new 8150 could handle so I installed Witcher 2. The automatic configuration put my graphics setting at low but I decided to try high. The graphics were amazing, I had no FPS loss and everything seemed great so I am wondering why the game thought that I should play on low setting. My fan was blowing constantly but I expect that happens with most games. I checked my internal temperature and it never got passed 70 degrees Celsius. As long as my temperature stays low, it there any reason that I should not play with graphics set on high? Cheers.

 

Nope you should be good. The auto-detect probably just didn't know what your graphics card was as they are generally based on a list within the program that never gets updated, and so if it was unknown it just assumed it couldn't run it

Have fun, wouldn't worry about it at all at those temps.

 

Thanks for the response. My old computer did not even have a dedicated graphics card and this Sager far exceeded my expectations. I had no idea how great graphics could look!

 

You have a misconception about how this works.

Graphics on low and high makes absolutely no difference to the load on your GPU and the temperatures generated. On low will just get you more framerates but the card will still be working exactly as hard as it would on high. Some games with no FPS cap (famous SC2 menu screen release bug) have been known to damage cards because even though it seemed like very little was happening on screen, the card was pumping out hundreds of frames per second on low graphics settings and temperatures were through the roof.

 

Thank you for clearing that up for me. So I guess the main thing is to just keep an eye on my temperature and make sure that it does not get too high.

I have another question. I got my laptop last week and I was wondering if I should install any of the new NVIDIA drivers available for my 458m. My xoticpc rep said that I should stick with Sager drivers but I know that sometimes a driver update can greatly improve performance. Would you have any input on whether I would benefit from the new NVIDIA drivers?

 

The stock driver is butt cheeks. Installing the latest driver from Nvidia will noticeably raise your performance.

 

"butt cheek"