Laptops are convenient and portable, but they often suffer from overheating. When you pack so many electronic components in such a small space, heat becomes a real issue. In this post, we’ll explore how to tell if your laptop is overheating and what you can do about it.
One easy thing to keep an eye on is your CPU temperature. It’s quite normal to see your CPU heat up under heavy use. But if your laptop feels painfully hot or if it’s behaving strangely, download a reputable hardware monitoring utility and check your processor’s core temperatures. Both AMD and Intel specified temperatures of around 100 degrees Celsius as a maximum, but a good rule of thumb is that if you’re getting over 90 degrees under load, you should probably try to cool your laptop down.
Batteries don’t particularly like excessive heat either. Their tolerances are lower than they are for CPUs. The lithium-ion batteries common in modern electronics should be kept below 45 degrees Celsius. If your battery is often running at high temperatures under load, its life might be shortened, and it might even swell up on you, which can damage other laptop components.
Heat can cause the soldering inside the machine to crack or warp. This phenomenon was at the center of a controversy called Bumpgate, which involved Nvidia and Apple. Nvidia sold a bunch of GPUs to Apple that turned out to be defective, and the issue wasn’t the GPU dies themselves. Instead, the soldering that held the die on to its package, arranged into small balls called bumps, was apparently made of a different material that didn’t behave in a way Nvidia expected once they heated up. As a result, many of these bumps expanded excessively, leading them to break entirely.
So, how can you cool things off? You can start by checking the ambient temperature of the room you’re in, ensuring that the air vents have clearance to breathe, and blowing out those vents with some compressed air to make sure they aren’t clogged with dust. A good cooling pad to sit your laptop on might also be a good idea. And remember, if you’re in the market for a new laptop, you can save yourself a headache by reading or watching reviews and making sure the model you’re looking at hasn’t been too hot to handle for other customers.
In conclusion, overheating can cause serious problems for your laptop, including damage to the battery and other components. So, it’s important to keep an eye on your laptop’s temperature and take steps to cool it down when necessary.