I have a Lenovo ThinkPad E570. It has a GTX 950m and an i7-7500u CPU in it. Also has 16gb of RAM. I mostly use it for work but I’ll occasionally do some light gaming on it.

I tried playing an 11 year old game on it today (Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance) and noticed a lot of stuttering. If I selected a unit the game would also stutter for a split second. If I rapidly click a unit, it basically freezes the game until I stop. I decided to run a temp monitoring program and found that the CPU was hovering in the high 60s to mid 70s (Celsius). Seemed reasonable. Went back to the game, played for a couple minutes, then checked the temps again. Apparently my cpu had spiked to 98 degrees at one point, just 2 degrees from the TJ max for this particular CPU.

While browsing the internet, the temp sits in the high 30s to low 40s. However I’ll occasionally get a spike to around 75 degrees. The fans don’t usually run while I’m browsing the Internet.

Now I’d be really frustrated if this laptop has some sort of issue considering it replaced a lenovo laptop about 6 months ago that had a faulty fan and was sent in for “repairs” three times. In each case whoever was doing repairs at the depot broke a different part on it. Finally asked for a refund and bought this laptop.

I know i7s run pretty hot, but hitting 98 degrees on an older game seems excessive. Any advice? Or does it sound like something in this laptop isn’t working out?

sounds like a normal laptop to me.

kidding aside , try the usual things like testing available airflow and exhaust , eliminate any outside factors you can think of like intakes being restricted or not having room for exhaust, then run some benchmarks and stress tests and check out how hot things get , if you have no problems in a large open well-ventilated space then you know that you need better intake/exhaust in your current environment. It doesn't explain the temperature spikes , but its a start.

Hopefully you are not cursed with an overheating cpu :( good luck

@envane: Put the laptop on a different surface and played the game again. It starts out fine staying in the 65-75 range. Totally reasonable. But after about 30-45 minutes the game starts to bog down and the temp will spike. It hit 99 degrees this time! Absolutely insane.

I’m seeing if it’s just something weird with this specific game. Currently downloading a Total War game. Should be more intensive on the CPU. If it doesn’t hit those same temps then it’s just Supreme Commander.

Well Total War spiked at 95 degrees. Guess it’s the CPU.

It’s a fairly thin laptop with intake vents on the bottom so I guess an i7 is just going to run pretty hot. That or something’s wrong with it.

Maybe I would need to be more worried if it was constantly in the 90s instead of occasional spikes.

Grab a can of compressed air and get all the dust out of the laptop vents. That tends to fix overheating problems.

There are cooling pads you can put under laptops to improve airflow. Not sure if that would help much though.

Usually the best thing you can do to improve laptop cooling (without getting silly) is putting better thermal paste on.

It is shocking how many manufacturers cheap out on thermal paste and/or apply it poorly.

@OP it doesn't really matter how old the game is, if it's able to rack up a high CPU usage % then heat is gonna happen.

@therealseaman: CPU usage rarely went above 70% when playing. It actually only hit 100% right when I exited the game. Still, the laptop that replaced this one would hit 100% easily but never went above 80 degrees. This one is hitting 99 degrees (again, 1 degree Away from max).

One thing I’m wondering, though...could it be that the temperature sensors in the laptop are the problem? My laptop is warm while playing games, but it really doesn’t feel exceptionally hot. Maybe the temp on the cpu is actually fine but because the sensors are reporting 99 degrees my games are being throttled? I have no idea. I heard that i7-7700 cpus had issues with faulty temp sensors. I mean, high 60s to low 70s for games on a laptop cpu seems fine. But a split-second spike to 99 which immediately goes back down to 60s and 70s? That seems really weird.

The laptop is still under warranty or else I would buy thermal paste and apply it myself. Thing is, because of my experience with lenovo’s repair services, I’d prefer to avoid that without breaking the warranty.

So I recorded a video showing me loading giantbomb.com with the idle temp and then showing the spike as the website loads. Can't figure out how to share it, unfortunately.

Basically, my laptop was sitting at 31-33 celsius. I load giant bomb and it immediately shoots up to 68 celsius. 1 second later (literally one second later) it goes back to 31-33. I also ran intel's diagnostic test tool for CPUs and it passed everything. Thermal test even said it never went above 73 degrees.

All of this sounds like the debacle that went down with i7-7700k CPUs where loading a website shot the temps up 30-40 degrees for 1 second, then went back down to idle temps. I'm going to contact Lenovo customer support tomorrow and figure out if it's something that needs fixing. I really don't think my laptop is reaching 99 degrees.

It is two or three years old, right? Twoo years is enough to get some dust bunnies. So, depending on how "fixable" your laptop is you could crack it open to blow out dust and clean the fans. If that requires take it apart -in a very complex and delicate way- you could try canned air from the outside.

I suppose you could try something like this that might prevent throttling....slightly.

Everyone thinks im crazy but I put a small fan up to my computer while playing games. If the game is really intensive my PC will start getting pretty dang hot unless I have that fan running.

I think constant 90’s specifically on laptops is high but expected for a laptop while gaming. My Aero 15x reaches 90s and everyone online says that’s the way it is when gaming.

I'm not sure how old the laptop is, but sometimes the thermal compound used degrade over time. Like my older MacBook Pro i had to take it apart and put on a new layer of thermal paste as the old crap that was on there didn't do a good job at anything.

This requires that you are comfortable taking the laptop apart of course, which most are not.

If you can, and are comfortable doing this, I find that the folks in the factory go crazy with the termal compound. Pop open the laptop, remove the heatpipe/heatsinks, and reapply a good thermal compound correctly.

We have computers all over our campus that do our digital signage. They're little i5 boxes that just play MP4s and JPGs all day - In order to keep temps and power usage low, I go into power settings and set max processor state to 50%. If your frame rate is stuttering because of throttling, I'd perhaps consider setting a max of 60 to avoid hitting throttle temps in the first place.

Just as an alternative train of thought in case it helps - I had a laptop which lasted about 8 years (retired it last year). It wasn't high end but after I put an SSD in to replace the HDD, it still ran well in the latter stages for my needs (Visual Studio/SQL and web browsing). Over that time I chose to replace the battery a couple of times rather than replace the laptop (much cheaper), just before I did that each time I noticed the laptop was hot and switching off for that reason. I opened it up again and it was fairly dust free inside (I looked after it) and the CPU fan was spinning, but I noticed the battery slot was sat right next to the CPU, so the dying batteries were causing my CPU to overheat each time when on charge.