So the problem is that when I play starcraft 2 my laptop will after certain amount of time turn off without any warning seemingly due to overheating. The laptop gets nowhere as hot when I play SC2 on battery power and won't shut off randomly. I've tried playing with the laptop plugged in without a battery but nothing has changed. The strange thing is that I can play much more demanding games such as ARMA 2 and Bad Company 2 on highish settings without any problems. My only conclusion is that it's a SC2 specific problem. I tried the UI overheating fix but that hasn't made a difference. I've also lowered the graphics settings. It's so annoying having to play SC2 in one hour segments on battery power. Any ideas what might be causing this? Thanks
This is also happening to me aswell, i also tried your way and only playing the game on battery power and that seemed to work fine. It must be a problem with the game itself but until they come up with a patch but you are right it is anoying
Most laptops go into a low-performance mode when on battery usually with the CPU capped to 50% max performance. I suspect it's shutting down when plugged-in due to the CPU overheating since it can then run at 100%. Most games tend to be more GPU intensive while staying light on the CPU so you're unlikely to see this problem on those games. Try using compressed air to clean out dust from the vents. If that doesn't help and you're fine with gaming performance even with the CPU capped, then just edit the power profiles so the CPU doesn't run at 100% when plugged in. You could also try re-applying thermal paste and reseating the CPU heatsink but note that doing so will void your warranty and if you're not very careful, might even render your laptop unuseable.
nik: Depends on the laptop, although that is not a long term solution. Post its make and model, and a dxdiag dump according to my FAQ and run HWMonitor to see what temps your machine is running at at idle. Post screen shots of the temps using alt+printscreen and tinypic.com (or something similar, I prefer tinypic cause my high speed ISP doesn't block it ) at idle plugged in and we'll try to get an idea what's going on.
http://i38.tinypic.com/590za.jpg this is with my laptop plugged in my make and model of my laptop is an acer aspire 8930g and for the dxdiag dump did u want the whole txt file in a message box
you can just attached the text file to a post. If its too large, zip/rar it first. Your CPU seems to be idling awesome (17C is awesome, room temp must be 17C), but your GPU is idling at 62C, which means it could easily get over 74C while playing the game (74C is considered the cut off temp for when things can start to go wrong, at least according to Intel engineers.) You may want to take your laptop in for maintenance, and tell them your GPU is overheating and shutting the machine down. It probably needs a new layer of thermal paste.
What was the room temp when you took that screenshot? Because while 17C looks awesome, all your other temps are showing higher than 30C. If your room temps are higher than 17C, then your CPU temps might not be getting reported correctly.
i also beleave i have fixed the problem, instead of my graphics power mode being at maxiumum i tured it down to high as it was when i was on my laptop batery and that seemed to work
