StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Hey howdy hey. I've got a 'gaming' laptop with a dual-core Centrino clocking at 2 ghz. This laptop is an ASUS piece of crap (I use that phrase with affection), and I'm sick and tired of it 'idling' at 39 C. I don't want to spend any money on external equipment for cooling, so I figured that underclocking my laptop would help my heat problems.

But I have no idea how to do this, and I was hoping some of the tech savy people here could point me in the right direction.

Your CPU should be automagically adjusting the clock frequency to fill the load. Hell, my desktop processor can do it (although it is an AMD processor). Are you running Windows? Usually there's some software for the CPU that'll do this.

On Vista at least, you have access to power plans that allow you to do this. "Power Saver" always clocks your CPU down (to 800ish mhz), "Balanced" turns on the dynamic clocking so your CPU clocks up or down depending on load, and "High Performance" sets it permanently to the highest clock.

If you have XP, you should look at Intel's site for an utility that should let you do something similar.

Of course, there are also numerous utilities available that allow you to permanently underclock your processor, but going by your description, the autoclocking mechanism (PowerNow/SpeedStep) is probably a better solution.

The program I seem to be using is "Power4Gear" from ASUS, and I've tweaked it so that the maximum processor state should never exceed 30%. However, my built in heat temp monitor (also from ASUS, "Asus NB Probe") has my processor stuck at 50%. I'm running Vista, by the way, and these 'tweaks' still leave my temperature at 41 c (According to SpeedFan, the processor cores are at 77 and 76 C).

I'll poke around ASUS's website and see if the bums have come up with anything, but other than that, I'm still open to advice.

I stick my (very old and increasingly cranky) laptop on an old baking cooling tray, they only cost a few quid and it really helps air get to the fans and circulate keeping it cool.

I've read mixed reviews of commercially available laptop cooling products as aside from being bulky, heavy and expensive (unlike my baking tray) they usually draw a current from the laptop to run their fans, placin more stress upon it the laptop and if the external coolers fans blow the wrong way for the laptops internal fans can actually make things worse.