Is there something wrong with my laptop?

[Cheezdoodles]

Recently bought a Dell Inspirion 1520 (Core 2 Duo 2.0 ghz 4mb cache, 2gb ram, 8600m GT, Vista).

I played 2 games so far. DAoC and Civ4. Civ4 runs great. DAoC runs great to, but cpu utilization is insane (90-100% when dual logging not using "clientsleep") and the laptop seems to get really hot.

Laptop froze on me 4 times when playing DAoC over the last 2 days, the fans are on and going at crazy speed at all times. Is the laptop overheating? If so why the hell is it overheating? This laptop has 50million times more cpu\gpu power needed to dual log in DAoC.

At one point i got minor graphical bugs, and Vista vent blank for a second saying it lost contact with GPU drivers but restored it.

(Graphical bugs where 1 enemy on screen started clipping).

 

[AlphaWolf]

I'd overheat too if I had to play 2 daoc accounts. j/k

Sounds like overheating to me unless there's some odd issue with daoc/vista. That game should run fine on a pIII.

 

[Sobek]

Definitely does sound like overheating. How recent is 'recently'? Months? A year? Is your house/home relatively dusty? Could just be some dust heavily caked up in the exhaust vents, i've been seeing that a lot recently... had 2 friends' laptops, both under one year old, both in relatively clean environments, and both so utterly choked on dust that they were producing artifacts in any 'stressfull' situation (flash-heavy sites, for instance). One of those laptops had an FX5600m in it though, so it would've allready been churning out the heat to begin with, let alone getting choked by dust

*edit* I've still got some pack for DAoC here, is it still alive and kicking?

 

[Rainbow Man]

Ostepop:
Maybe you need to run a hardware monitor of some sort. Fanspeed for example or whatsitscalled. Maybe Nvidia has some temperature monitor display too. That way it's easy to verify if your laptop's guts run really hot.

Perhaps Ntune works even with non-NV chipset in the system? I haven't tried. In the past tehy had a GPU temp display built right into the driver settings window but it seems to be gone these days.

Peace.

 

[Cheezdoodles]

How recent is 'recently'? Months?

4 days

*edit* I've still got some pack for DAoC here, is it still alive and kicking?

On the US servers, very much alive still. On europe not so much

 

[Cheezdoodles]

New update.

I downloaded N-tune to monitor the heat, and it seems its not overheating at all.

GPU usually idles around 50-53 degrees Celcius depending on clockspeed (It automatically de-clocks itself to save battery life), and 57 degrees when running DAoC. Guess its just vista?