The work-from-home culture has resulted in the widespread adoption of laptops or desktops for both office work as well as play. Laptops offer nearly the same specs as a desktop but are highly portable and therefore, are more appealing to the average consumer. While laptops offer excellent portability, these compact machines can sometimes lack a good cooling solution. Most of the budget laptops have small exhaust vents and mediocre exhaust fans which can’t cope up with the powerful hardware inside them.
This might lead to thermal throttling meaning your components can’t reach their full potential because of high temperatures. This might seem like a big problem but you can use laptop cooling pads, proper laptop placement, etc to resolve these issues. So read on to know about more ways to bring down your CPU and GPU temperatures.
Clean your Laptop’s Exhaust
Some of the best Laptops in the market are equipped with large exhaust vents and powerful exhaust fans that keep the temperatures under control but budget laptops are a completely different story. They have tiny exhaust vents which often get blocked by dust, particulates, etc.
Blocked exhaust vents restrict the laptop’s airflow which ultimately results in high internal temperatures. Therefore, it’s recommended to regularly clean your laptop’s exhaust with a blower or a can of air especially if you use it in dusty environments. You can also use your trusty hair-dryer to blow out the restricting particles from the laptop’s vent for proper airflow.
Invest in a Laptop Cooler
Laptops can’t be equipped with beefy coolers because of their compact design and this leads to improper cooling which often results in thermal throttling. You can overcome this problem by simply investing in a good-quality laptop cooler. There are a number of laptop coolers available at every price point you can think of.
You can either get a USB-powered cooling pad or a laptop table equipped with a fan or two. These fans take out the hot air present inside the laptop making sure CPU and GPU temps are under control even during a heavy gaming session. You can power them up via a USB-port present on your laptop or using a power bank (in case you are worried about your laptop’s battery life).
Place the Laptop on a Hard Flat Surface
When it comes to heating issues, laptop placement is very crucial, considering the fact that most budget laptops have exhaust vents at the bottom. People usually use their laptops from the comfort of their bed or place them on their laps which blocks the exhaust vents. Because of this blockage, the exhaust fans can’t cool it down and the internal components heat up which leads to lower performance.
The solution to this problem is pretty simple, all you need to do is place the laptop on a hard flat surface like a table. Moreover, make sure that the table is dust-free otherwise the laptop cooler might get clogged with dust and other unmentionable debris.
Routine Maintenance
A laptop requires routine maintenance similar to your car or bike that needs to be serviced every now and then. There are a lot of components inside a laptop that require regular cleaning and maintenance. If not properly cleaned, they will get covered with dust which might result in inefficient heat dissipation.
If you are experienced in such tasks and familiar with the hardware, then you can do the routine maintenance yourself or you can take it to a professional for maintenance and cleaning. If your laptop is under warranty, then take it to an authorized service center as prying it open (even for cleaning) will void its warranty.
Optimize Settings
If you do a lot of graphic-intensive work like gaming or rendering then you must have experienced heating and lag issues at some point or the other. There are a lot of ways to solve this, but the easiest and most cost-efficient way to lower the settings.
If you are a hardcore gamer and like gaming on the go, then you can try lowering the games’ graphical settings and turning off some of the settings like the resolution, screen-space reflections, and (if available) ray-tracing features which are really demanding on the GPU.
With this article, you are now ready to bring down your laptop’s temperature and prevent thermal throttling. But do remember that the above-mentioned techniques will only bring down your laptop’s temperatures and you might not see a significant boost in performance as it solely depends upon your laptop’s hardware.