Hey I've been playing king's bounty the legend and it's really good but because of it's high (by my standards anyway) system requirements I can't play I for more than a few hours at a time or my laptop will overheat (the only desktop that I have reliable access to is ancient). Should I just turn down the settings and hope for the best, or are there any other good ways to reduce laptop heat?

Maybe invest in a cooling pad. Also, start digging up forums on King's bounty to see if it's an issue. Overheating is known to happen on Sims 3 with specific hardware and some people report enabling vsync prevents the issue on TS3.

Make sure the laptop is on a hard surface like a table, not a lap, sofa, bed, carpet etc.

Cleaning it out might help, as the laptop gets more dust inside it, the fan will get worse at cooling it.

Unfortunately, because my laptop is somewhat old and difficult to clean out, it overheats quite easily. I have a cooling platform for it which has a massive fan constantly blowing air onto the underside of the laptop. I also have an extractor fan that fits on the exhaust, I use that when doing something intensive, it really does help (the maximum temperature it reaches is lower and it idles at a lower temperature too).

Turn down shadows and filtering a little at least for extended play.
In the UK (at least) you can get a Tekninka brand USB netbook fan from a pundland shop (everything costs a pound - so i guess you may find them in a dollar store etc) - theyve done well with my own laptop.

Also suggest a clean of the air ducts once in a while.

I can testify that if your laptop temps are higher than normal, you may need to clean the fan and vents of excess dust. I did this earlier in the year and it made a big difference.

Otherwise, get a laptop cooler, or just keep the laptop slightly elevated to improve airflow beneath it.

Like others in this thread I recommend cleaning out the laptop if you can and using a cooling pad. If those don't help enough, then you can try tweaking the graphics settings a bit for the game a little at a time until you reach a good balance between system load and graphical detail. I don't know much else that can help, sorry...

This, bit also -
so far i'd suggest everything pretty much - even just as preventative measures

If you know what you're doing you could also repaste the CPU/GPU heatsinks...
Otherwise get a can of compressed air to clear out any dust in the fan/vents
Get a cooling pad and/or elevate the bottom of the laptop as has been suggested already

Yup, you got it right. King's Bounty is more effective than flamethrower in making older PC graphic cards and laptops burn.

It's poorly optimized and my old card barely handled it while I was able to play much more graphically advanced games without bigger problems.


I join the "clean the laptop" group as well.
Lately, when I broke my PC and I needed to use our old laptop. It wouldn't even boot up, so I opened it and cleaned all the dust and I was able to get it to work again.

It's not a technical solution but I just prop the front edge of my laptop up with my glasses case. You may find something as simple as that works wonders. Otherwise, you can invest in a cooling pad which are pretty cheap. Here's a link to amazon uk which will provide specifics.

Right now I'm using a CoolerMaster Notepal U2. Here's the pros and cons:

Pros:

- The fans can easily moved around so it can be placed on the air intakes of your laptop.
- Pretty much silent.
- It can double as your laptop protector.
- The USB power connector have female connector on it so you don't lose a USB slot.
- Solid built.

Cons:

- The fans pump the air in is not that powerful, but it's good enough to pump enough air the help cool my laptop down so I can play World of Tanks without my laptop turning itself off to prevent overheating.
- Heavy.

So far the pros outweight the cons for me. I'm strong enough to lug that thing around and the laptop never turn itself down during gaming with tasking works.

I wonder when they're gonna make laptops more easier to clean up? My wife has a laptop, and it's a real pain to get somewhat dust-free...

I have used this for a long time: Zalman NC2000

I second this. My mother bought one for her laptop and it works quite well. I would also make sure to use a frame limiter or VSync in games to avoid unnecessary usage of your GPU. Even better if you accept low amount of frame rates.

To limit frame rates, If the laptop has an nvidia card download this: Nvidia Inspector

With AMD I'm not sure but I believe EVGA Precision X offers frame limiting option. This should work for Nvidia too. (I haven't tried it)

There's also RivaTuner Statistics Server, this should work for AMD and Nvidia, it works for me (I've Nvidia).