Laptop Temperature/Gaming

Hello, I recently brought a refurbished Sony Vaio laptop. I wasn't expecting it to be able to do much gaming and that's not really why i brought it, but I do enjoy the odd game, however it gets hot while doing so - naturally.

Now I'm not an expert on operating temperatures or laptop hardware. I brought a Belkin cooling pad (it was reasonably cheap) but I don't think it does much beside elevate it off the desktop. I'm getting temperatures, according to HWMonitor averaging in the mid 50's (degrees C) for normal use (browsing, music, video etc), which can increase as high as 71-72 depending on the game (Shogun 2 TW pushes it the most so far and is probably as advanced a game as i can reasonably run).

Is this safe? According to the info i've found on the SOny product forums the max operating temp is 105 degrees C, but I can't imagine running it at that speed regularly or for any length of time is healthy.

If those temperatures are not healthy then are there any reasonable solutions I can try. I'm not a tech wiz and I've no interest in tinkering with the insides (and voiding the warranty I have). It seems to me laptop cooling pads are more of a placebo than anything else as I've not come across anything with a rock solid reputation.

Thanks for reading. Apologies if this is in the wrong forum.

 

72 is fine, when you start getting into the 90s is when you should be worried

 

I hope so, though i've seen no reason to think otherwise

 

So i got about 76 degrees while playing Star Trek Online. That's the highest it's got. Didn't have any issues while playing, but are you are sure temperatures around that level are healthy? Seems awfully hot to me

 

Is the fan blowing a decent amount of hot air out the vent? If not, the air passages might be clogged with dust and need to be cleaned. If the air is not hot, then the thermal paste between the cpu/gpu and the heatsink needs to be replaced.

 

seems to be fine.

I'm just trying to ascertain if the temperatures i've mentioned are healthy. I don't think there's any hardware issues.

 

The temperatures seem fine to me. At heavy loads, of course. If it starts shutting down unexpectedly under stress you'll need to back off a bit - you can reduce game graphics settings or limit the maximum CPU.

 

Thanks, but what temperature would you say is the limit before it starts getting a problem, broadly speaking.

 

On my model, 95 deg C. I have used it at that temperature while gaming and other intense stuff like circuit simulation and video encoding. Anything above that gets dicey - too close to the shutdown point (whatever it is) - even a momentary further spike will trigger the shutdown.

OpenHardwareMonitor has a nice graph which you can configure to show you things you are interested in monitoring, and see the history over the time period of interest. I like to keep that running in the background so I can come back to it from time to time and see how high the temps have gone.

 

i have it running in the background as well. That way i can see/check at what points the temperature spikes and how much.

 

Is it more performance intsneive to run a game full screen or windowed?

 

an my idle temps are near 60C and when i active my performance mode on vaio vpcz2, temps reach near 88-91 C.

is it normal?