How a laptop’s cooling system affects gaming performance

An effective cooling system in a laptop allows you to maximize the potential of the device, both in conventional computing and in computer games, therefore, when choosing your mobile assistant, special attention should be paid not only to the hardware filling, but also to the presence of an effective cooling system in the device. After all, a properly designed cooling system will prevent the laptop from getting too hot and dropping the frequency of the processor and video card. Perhaps, no one will deny the importance of having the right cooling system in a laptop.

To understand how the cooling system in a laptop affects gaming performance, we will consider three models of mobile computers belonging to the class of entry-level gaming laptops in which a discrete NVIDIA GTX 1050 graphics card is installed. In general, this graphics card offers an excellent balance between gaming performance and mobility, of course, comfortable You won’t get FPS in Witcher 3 or Red Dead Redemption 2 at 1080p and at the maximum level of detail, but in online games like WOT, Fortnite and CS: GO, the NVIDIA GTX 1050 video card shows a good frame rate even in FULL HD resolution and maximum detail. The mobile version of the GeForce GTX 1050 is only 5-10% behind its desktop counterpart.

So, to begin with, let’s look at the technical characteristics of the NVIDIA GTX 1050 video card, let’s immediately make a reservation that this model is positioned by the manufacturer as a gaming one. The graphics core that forms the basis of the GeForce GTX 1050 is codenamed GP107. This video chip is manufactured by Samsung using 14nm technology and has 640 CUDA cores. The base clock speed of the core is 1354 MHz, and in Boost mode it can be increased up to 1493 MHz. The video card has a bus width of 128 bits and can be supplied with either 2 or 4 GB GDDR5 video memory.

For testing, we selected three laptop models with similar characteristics: Dell G3 15 3579, Lenovo IdeaPad 330-15ICH and MSI GF63 8RC, all three models are equipped with a Core i5-8300H processor and a discrete NVIDIA GTX 1050 graphics card with 4 GB of GDDR 5 memory.

Below in the photo you can get acquainted with the cooling system of laptops, as we can see, it is different for everyone, respectively, and it cools in different ways.

The cooling system consists of two fans and the same number of heat pipes. At rest, the system is completely silent, but with any activity, like opening a browser or watching a video, the fans immediately come to life and begin to spin.

MSI GF63 8RC

MSI decided to reduce the cooling system in the laptop by exactly half compared to its predecessor GF62VR, apparently saving money on the face. See for yourself: six heatpipes and two fans for the GF62VR and one fan with three heatpipes for the GF63.

Lenovo IdeaPad 330-15ICH

The design of the cooling system includes two fans, and this is only a plus, since one “fan” for both the processor and the video card as in the MSI GF63 8RC is clearly not enough. In addition to a pair of fans, there are two heat pipes, one thicker, the other, respectively, thinner.

Next, we will test in synthetics and computer games and look at the results.

3D Mark Fire Strike Graphics

3DMark Fire Strike is a beautiful and popular application with DirectX 11 API support for testing computers with high-performance gaming graphics cards in the Windows environment. 3DMark Fire Strike results help you evaluate the comparative performance of a video card and its suitability for the most demanding PC games.

3DMark – Fire Strike Graphics 1920×1080

Dell G3 15 3579

6262

MSI GF63 8RC

6069

Lenovo IdeaPad 330-15ICH

6327

In 3DMark Fire Strike synthetics, as you can see, Lenovo IdeaPad 330-15ICH shows a better result than the MSI GF63 8RC version, you can also see that the result is Dell G3 15 3579, whose cooling system based on two fans is not much ahead of a laptop from MSI with one fan system cooling. Next, let’s take a look at the gaming performance of the three laptops in The Witcher 3 and Rise of the Tomb Raider.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Is a multi-platform computer role-playing game developed by the Polish studio CD Projekt RED based on the series of novels The Witcher by Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski, a sequel to the computer games The Witcher and The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. The final part of the trilogy. According to the developers, the third part of the series will combine a non-linear storyline and a multi-regional open game world, which will be thirty times larger than the world of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. For movement, you can use various vehicles, such as a horse or a ship. The passage of the main storyline will take about 50 hours of the game. Side quests will take about the same amount. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was developed on the RedEngine 3 game engine, which is focused on next generation platforms and will ultimately break the boundaries between game graphics and CGI movies. The fundamental difference between RedEngine 3 compared to its predecessor is that REDengine 3 is built to support open world games. RED Engine 3 focuses not only on graphics and physics, but also on building a non-linear quest system, allowing you to make the gameplay even more close to real life. RED Engine supports dynamic shadows, normal mapping and parallax. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has both basic and advanced graphical settings. Any user will be able to customize the game to their liking, relying on the performance of the existing system.

Rise of the Tomb Raider from the first minutes of the game makes it clear that we have not seen anything like this before. The term “realistic” is probably not entirely successful, because with each new step in the game graphics, on a wave of delight, it seems that, finally, the picture has become “like in life”, and when you look at the same game a few years later, all that remains is laugh at how rude and ridiculous everything really was. For Rise of the Tomb Raider, Crystal Dynamics uses a new game engine called the Foundation Engine. Whether it is a refinement of the past Crystal Engine, or a new development – this question remains a mystery. Rise of the Tomb Raider is a very beautiful game and bypasses other modern game projects in many visual parameters. The graphic part has become noticeably brighter and more expressive compared to its predecessor Tomb Raider 2013.

Please note that testing in games showed that the difference in the number of FPS is not very large, only 1-2 Fps, hence the conclusion that cooling in our case has practically no effect on gaming performance. The only thing left to do is to find out the heating of the video card while playing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, it will be interesting to know if the GPU temperature is approaching a critical value.

The cooling system in the Lenovo IdeaPad 330-15ICH laptop copes well with its task; heating the video card is the smallest of the three test devices, we can even see an increase in the core frequency up to 1708 MHz. The cooling system of Dell G3 15 3579 is good because it manages to keep the frequency close to the maximum 1708 MHz, at rather low temperatures 69°C. As expected, the MSI GF63 8RC had the highest heating of the video card core, however, the GPU worked stably at 1645 MHz, it would be better if the temperature did not exceed 80 ° C, but due to the design of the cooling system, the GPU temperature in games, it dangerously approaches critical, which can lead to damage to the crystal and subsequent repair. What we get as a result, as we see on the basis of our three test specimens in the game, the performance is almost the same, so we can conclude that the cooling system has little effect on gaming performance if an NVIDIA GTX 1050 video card is used, so there is not much difference in how S.O is designed on based on two fans or one.