Keeping your laptop low with temperature while playing your favorite video games is not only important to get optimal gaming performance but also to keep the risk of untimely hardware failure low that is usually caused by overheating. Overheating of laptops is so common and many of us have already witnessed this, and that is the reason why reputable brands like Razor, Asus, MSI, etc, are struggling day and night to bring new modern cooling techniques. Acer has brought keyboard sliding technique in its Predator Helios 700 to provide room for air circulation. Similarly, in Rog Zephyrus GX501 you can open a section on its bottom for frequent airflow.

Laptop overheating is a critical issue indeed, it can lead to hardware failure if not been given attention on time. Here in this article, we will help you with different kinds of precautionary measures that you can take whenever your laptop gets overheated.

Steps to Avoid Overheating While Playing Games

Below are some simple and easy-to-implement steps that definitely can help you to tackle the laptop’s heating issue.

Use Flat and Even Surface

Among many other precautionary steps, this one is one of the simplest and pretty much useful in terms of getting rid of overheating. Inadequate air ventilation is the main cause of overheating in many cases. You simply need to place your laptop on an even and flat surface, this will help cold air to get inside easily and from inside, there will be enough room for hot air to come out instead of a blockade. Placing your laptop on an uneven and dumpy surface, like a pillow, mattress, etc. The curves produced on these types of things while placing your laptop on them will result in blocking the cold air to get inside, and similarly, the fan pumping out hot air won’t come out easily, causing it to overheat. The best practice is to use a flat and balanced surface to place the laptop on while playing video games.

Use of Cooling Pad

Another simple and useful practice is the use of a cooling pad for overheating issues. Cooling pads help the laptop to get more frequent fresh air and to pump out hot air easily from the inside. There is a wide range of cooling pads for laptops available in the market, you can pick up one to help yourself if you have laptop overheating issues while playing games. These cooling pads come with built-in fans which blow air from the bottom of your laptop. With these useful cooling pads, you can play your favorite video games sitting anywhere on a mattress, pillow, carpet, etc. If you see yourself as a professional gamer with a gaming laptop, investing a little in cooling can benefit you a lot with iota hardware failure risk.

Check & Clean Fans

You need to regularly check your laptop’s fans that if working properly or not. You can put your hand near the vents, if hot air is coming out frequently, then that means the fans are working properly. If you put your hand near the vents and no airflow is coming out that you can feel, this means the fans might have accumulated some dust and dirt which needs to be cleaned to let the fans work efficiently. An air blower or any other technique with compressed air can be used to do this also, if the fan is broken or not working for any other reason, make sure to consult a professional in order to prevent further hardware damage.

Avoid Using Intense Processes

The next biggest factor can be the use of high-power consumptive programs in the background while playing video gaming. Video gaming itself is a pretty resource-hungry activity, considering you deal with intense graphics. So, if you have any other application running in the background while playing games, it will result in an increase in fan speed as well as noticeable overheating. It is often advised to quit out of any other powerful software like Adobe Illustrator, Camtasia, or any other falling within the same category, to get good gaming performance with no overheating issues.

Limit your FPS

All professional gamers try to achieve higher FPS, high FPS makes your gaming relatively smooth. This increase in FPS is because you put more burden on your hardware resources to give you fluent and smooth performance, which can sometimes result in overheating as well. For instance, if you are using 100 FPS while playing any professional-level video game, you are putting pressure on your GPU and processor to give you a more joyous gaming experience, this will result in producing more heat. Please note, 60 FPS is mostly recommended to keep the heating issues in perspective and ensure a good gaming performance.

GPU Under-clocking

Just as higher FPS, GPU overclocking no doubt brings ultimate performance but uses more resources as well which results in frequent overheating. Avoid overclocking if you can sacrifice a bit of performance to deal with the heating issues. Bring back setting values to default and see if your laptop is still producing a lot of heat, you need to under-clock your hardware. Under-clocking means lowering your setting further to deal with heat production and resource consumption. Thus, scarifying a bit of performance might result in minimizing heat production.

Use of Integrated Graphics

Most gaming laptops are equipped with dedicated graphics cards to bring the best possible graphical performance while playing games. Similarly, these dedicated graphics cards are used by other professionals dealing with intensive visuals like rendering. The best possible practice to handle heat production is to use integrated graphics, they won’t provide the same performance as offered by dedicated graphics but you won’t face heating issues frequently. Still, if you can’t compromise performance by sticking to a dedicated GPU, you can use external coolers to deal with heat.

Plug-in your Charger

To keep up with power-intensive games and to get the best gaming experience, you must ensure that the required voltage is provided. Most of the time, your system gets overheated when the required voltage is not provided. For that purpose, make sure that your laptop is plugged-in while playing high-end games.