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Hi All
I don't know much about computers but whenever I use Zwift lately the fan on my laptop seems to be going full pelt the entire time- like, enough that I can hear it from the room next door in my house. Not sure if this is a problem?
The laptop is a fairly new budget gaming laptop (HP Pavilion) bought maybe a year or 18months or so ago so I wouldn't have thought running Zwift would be a problem.
I'm 90% sure it never used to do this and it's only happened recently. It starts as soon as Zwift boots up and not just when I'm "riding". There's nothing else running at the time and if I do CTRL/ALT/DEL and look at the Task List thing it has Zwift using pretty much all the CPU.
Do I need to do something I wonder or is it acceptable?
melt, no....
explode... maybe
Cleaning the vents of dust using compressed air will help.
YOu can also open it up to clean dust out, but it can sometimes be difficult on modern laptops.
Zwift maxes your CPU. Not much you can't do about it just the way it is. Make sure the fan vents are not blocked or obstructed.
Try turning the graphics option down on Zwift.
Pretty normal on a gaming laptop. You're pretty much throwing 200W of heat into a small place and need to get rid of it somehow,
If out of warranty consider opening it up and replacing the thermal paste on the heatsink, but screaming fans are nothing out of the ordinary. If the core temperatures start to approach their limits then the computer will automatically throttle its performance.
Battery saver mode on Zwift will cap the frame rate and reduce the workload on the computer. I wouldn't be worried about breaking it though - just get used to the noise.
No, it won't melt. GPUs will automatically slow down if they start getting too hot to reduce their heat output. Some laptops will be able to keep the GPU below this 'max' temperature when running flat out, some won't and rely on it to keep temperatures in check. Zwift graphics are hard, so chances are your GPU is running flat out all the time. A good practice is to set a global frame limiter in Nvidia/AMD control panel, so if the GPU is reaching your screen's refresh rate, it doesn't try any harder and has a rest.
High fan noise is to be expected, GPU's produce a lot of heat, so squeezing them in a laptop is hard. This is the main reason you should never buy a gaming laptop on specs alone, as it's the cooling system that defines how hard the GPU can work for long periods of time and at what noise level.
Thanks All, that is reassuring. I'll keep on top of the dust vents as suggested. The noise itself isn't a problem as I have headphones on but just wanted to make sure I'm not slowly killing it.
I bought it in lockdown in case I got into gaming when bored, which I never did, but still tempted to have a go on Doom or something.
On the last HP laptop I ended having to use a bit of tape to split the airflow at the back as the intake was right next to the outgoing vent, resulting in a circular air loop especially if the back of the laptop was near something. Poor design really but the tape helped. There are laptop base things with fans in to help with overall cooling; not sure how effective they are though.
There's clearly something very wrong indeed OP, I've read on here with alarming regularity that there's only one thing which causes my laptop seems to be going full pelt the entire time- like, enough that I can hear it from the room next door in my house and it isn't zwift.
Are you sure you've not got a Web browser open behind zwift?
😉