What are some good habits of using the laptop GPU (for VaM or other games)

[haroldwithlove]

VaM is a game that burns GPU a lot in my opinion (My GPU temperature is always ~70C) . Do you guys have any special habits for making your laptop GPU cooler or live longer? Like special software or settings in VaM or Nvidia control panel.

I personally basically do nothing except for using a cooling pad for laptop. Also I would avoid running VaM for longer than one hour for one time. I know desktops will have a completely different story... Feel free to share your habits even if you are using desktops (with liquid cooling system or not)....

 

[MacGruber]

I haven't used a laptop in years, but back in the days I used some screw nuts that fit by chance exactly into the rubber feet of my laptop. So the laptop was some 3-4 mm higher above the table, which kept it a lot cooler.

These days you may want to look into "undervolting". Basically you try if your CPU or GPU can do the same with a little less voltage/power, which means less heat. However, keep in mind, just as overclocking, playing with voltages will void warranty and if you go too far it might produce calculation errors. Some of these errors may be obvious, like crashing...or less obvious...which can be dangerous if you use your laptop for anything important.

70C is totally fine for a GPU, though.

 

[qoosh]

I use the turbo mode on my laptop for high power usage (I have an ASUS) and I use a cooling pad. I too would like to know what is the best brand / specs for a gaming laptop for using VAM as my temperature can go pretty high too. (70C is actually pretty low by the way.) I also heard that 2.X will be less GPU heavy, so I hope that this may solve some of the overheating problem.

 

[keycode]

70°c average playing vam is a miracle temp for a so called ugly "gaming laptop" ... unless that value is idle or normal temp. "Let the dust come in"

 

[MacGruber]

I too would like to know what is the best brand / specs for a gaming laptop for using VAM as my temperature can go pretty high too. (70C is actually pretty low by the way.) I also heard that 2.X will be less GPU heavy, so I hope that this may solve some of the overheating problem.

Unless space or mobility is the reason, gaming laptops are a waste of money. Even if it says it got like an RTX3080 in it, it will be like half the speed of a desktop PC for equivalent money. Simply because Desktop PCs can eat more power and dump heat way more easily. CPU eats like 120W these days, a proper graphics card more than 200W. Heat has to go somewhere. I mean a desktop PC usually has like 1kg+ block of alluminium and heatpipes just for the CPU to dump heat into. And another such block for the graphics card....that's probably close to the weight of your entire laptop already. Not to mention plenty of huge 12 or 14cm fans. A laptop is always running into heat trouble after a few seconds and then has to throttle down. Either by power or heat limit. That's probably why you always reach exactly 70C...because someone set your graphics card to throttle down at that point so it doesn't get any hotter.

Note that VaM is not GPU heavy, its CPU heavy because it can only utilize 2-3 threads and even those are not optimally balanced. This is supposed to improve with VaM 2.x, it should be able to utilize all your cores, so the GPU will become more important.


You might want to check this benchmark thread. Keep in mind, most of those will be desktop machines, but maybe some people mention they are running on a laptop:

Benchmark Result Discussion

This thread is intended to share and discuss result from the MacGruber Benchmark plugin. As a side project, I was looking at PC components for upgrading my old machine. That made me browse through various forum threads on the Hub discussing FPS in VaM. Everyone is posting random FPS values, but...

hub.virtamate.com

 

[TToby]

Edit: I was just writing a long text when MacGrubers post came in... He already has said everything in much better words than mine...

A gaming laptop is always a compromise. For mobility you pay two times: one time you pay with your money and one time you pay with lack of speed. What is a laptop high-end GPU worth, being castrated and always running into heat issues? It will probably be only comparable to a much lower and cheaper PC card.
Like MacGruber said: Why should a (experienced) Gaming PC user put a lot of annoying 12-14cm fans and a lot of heat sinks or expensive water cooling in his case if it would not be neccessary?
It is a simple calculation: Electrical power will produce heat. A modern gaming PC will easily be on 400-600 Watts, with some spikes even higher. This is enough to cook a meal or heat a room in winter.
I know you don't really want to hear that and maybe you already know all of this, but IMHO a gaming laptop is a relict from former times, when high-end GPUs had maybe up to 40-80 Watt. But untill there is demand, there will be supply! With an slowly evolving "FPS per Watt" ratio, "high-end" gaming laptops are in my oppinion only a shiny thing with a big price tag, untill we will get a completely new chip technology. They might have some astonishing and clever cooling solutions, but they can't do magic. No offense!!

But that wasn't your question! What can you do about this? On the hardware side you can do only a little. Obviously don't block the air in- and outtakes, or doing some undervolting. But there is a lot you can do in VaM:
-There are some things in VaM that are very performance hungry, like unoptimized hair and clothes. Avoid them!
-Only use simple scenes with maybe one person... every additional person will eat up a huge load of performance.
-Keep a simple light setup... every additional light source adds a huge load of stress to your GPU.
-Have a look at your FPS and temperatures... there will be a point where your hardware will throttle down while keeping the same heat. You have to be aware of that heat/FPS sweetspot.

This doesn't mean you can't have fun with VaM. If you don't do this already, I would suggest to create more of your own scenes, so you have much better control over those performance eating components. Make some experiments: A simple hairstyle but with lots of segments can be worse than a cool and high detailed CUA environment, for instance. One light source more or less can make the difference, aso. IMHO creating your own stuff is a lot of fun in VaM.

 

[danou]

Working with any laptops demands that you tweak your machine :

1- undervolting your CPU (i use Throttlestop) Also in some cases you need to reduce the turbos
You have to know that GPU and CPU often have shared heat pipes so if one part is hot it heats the other one

2- undervolting GPU (i use MSI afterburner) Using the voltage curve editor will result in lower voltage for same amount of mhz
with my 2080 at 150w max, I like to top the mhz at 1850 and 870 mv (would be different for each GPU) that way i can lower temps of GPU 5-10 degrees
doing this will make you lose a little bit of performance but you won't really notice it
Also you have to know that those GPU have normal and max working temps, my 2080 is 87 degrees max
I even cut the bottom of my laptop allowing more air to cool it

then i sometimes use 2 Noctua 5v fans directly under CPU an GPU.
With All this, I went from gaming at 95 degree CPU 87 GPU to 65-70 degree for both and most importantly very quiet fans

Anyway, with 70 degree you probably have a 30 series GPU card, those cards are known with lower working temps
AND you should be very happy with those temps