Gaming laptop overheats only when second life is open

[ReyRor]

I play lots of heavy-load games with lots of visuals  But nothing causes my laptop to overheat as much as second life. 

I use NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1650 

I dont know whats the issue and why it overheats too much although my fans are clean and dust-free.  

 

[Persephone Emerald]

Second Life is hard on graphics cards. Be sure to lower your draw distance to around 320 m or lower, your LOD to around 2.0, and avatar complexity of other people's avatars to around 120,000 or lower. People usually suggest a draw distance of 252, but I like to see further. I also set my LOD to 2.5 because I have hair and some things in my house that won't render well at 2.0. Just basically lower your graphics settings until your computer isn't overheating. Do you really need shadows enabled? Transparent water is easier to render than reflections. If you're using Firestorm, try the setting in the viewer that tells you how much your environment and your avatar components are affecting your graphics rendering.

There are some other settings you can do on your computer to lower the strain on it, but that's not my area of expertise, so I don't remember what they are.

[Henri Beauchamp]

33 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

Second Life is hard on graphics cards. Be sure to lower your draw distance to around 320 m or lower, your LOD to around 2.0, and avatar complexity of other people's avatars to around 120,000 or lower.

Actually, the lighter the rendering load, and the hotter the GPU will become when the viewer is left running without limiting the frame rate (which can then skyrocket and since the consumed energy, measured in joules, will be about the same for each frame in a given scene, increasing the number of frames per second just heats thing up proportionally). E.g., in a sky box (where there is almost nothing to render) on a modern desktop PC, my viewer can render at up to a ludicrous 1500fps, and then the fans roar, the GPU hitting its maximum power consumption.

The true solution is to use the frame rate limiter (most TPVs got one).

When the viewer does not provide one such limiter (e.g. for the official viewer), you may enable VSync (which will sadly degrade overall performances and cause frame rate stuttering, making SL feel much less ”smooth”).

Edited February 12 by Henri Beauchamp

[AmeliaJ08]

It's surprising SL causes it given it is pretty bad at utilizing graphics cards, it does however hit the CPU reasonably hard... but probably about as much as any game.

There's nothing specific about SL that would cause this as far as I know, do you maybe use SL in bed or something different to your normal gaming? if everything is clean and dust free then you might want to try limiting the frame rate although it has been found that the frame late limiter in Firestorm is bugged so if you're using that then limit the frame rate in the Nvidia control panel instead.

 

Edited February 12 by AmeliaJ08

[Jackson Redstar]

What Henri said, use the frame limiter in preferences, And also keep the air ducts clean and make sure there is plenty of airflow

[Psyche Starling]

Cooling pad. It changed my (second) life for the price of about $25. Seriously, I cannot overstate how much of a miracle it felt like.

[PheebyKatz]

I used to have a fan under my laptop, but it broke. These days I have a better laptop, but it will still overheat sometimes if I don't have it up off of the surface it's on, at least at the corner with the GFX card.

I never thought to have to limit the framerate, because I never had much of one anyway, but seeing it's jumped up to absurd digits when I un-minimize the viewer, I decided to go ahead and limit it to 26 (because I really don't need anything more than that, anyway), and, whaddya know? Yet another finesse that's improved it all.

Thank you so much for mentioning the FPS thing.

[Ardy Lay]

Laptops are for making waffles.

[PheebyKatz]

4 hours ago, Ardy Lay said:

Laptops are for making waffles.

My first two years in SL I was on a netbook (remember those?) running Tiny Linux off a thumb drive, and I still made it work.

Just because I can use it for making waffles doesn't mean I can't make it do internet dress-up dollies, too.

XD

[gwynchisholm]

Clean and repaste your laptop. Any decent laptop is supposed to be capable of running at full system max load without thermal throttling itself. If it can’t, something is hindering cooling performance.

SL is fairly demanding on a system, substantially more so than it would look like. 
Reducing load is one way to accomplish this, framerate limits, reducing settings, etc. You could also set up a power plan when playing SL to limit the max cpu or GPU frequency to reduce thermal output, or use an external cooling pad, but that might not do a whole lot depending on the design of the machine.

But the biggest one is clean and repaste.