Does Your Computer Get Hot As Hell While Playing SL?

Wow, the title kind of rhymed.

Anywho (haha, I sound British), my computer seems to get beyond burning point whenever I play SL. I am on a laptop and might not be able to have kids because of it. My computer even went so far as to manually shut down due to over heating one time.

Anyone else with me on this one?

I use a desktop computer, but yes it does get rather hot. SL is very graphics and processor intensive, just like alot of high graphics game, typicaly it takes up 50% or around that of my processor (just like other games). And can get rather hot. I don't think this is rare, for the sake of your children usea heat mat! Also it may be good to have a fan on it, or something, I dunno, dunno much about PC cooling.

No, but the fan is going

My fan is going like crazy! I had an idea of putting it on top of the freezer, but I didn't want my food to spoil . A heat mat is a good idea though. Also, I've played other graphic intensive games like counterstrike and such, but none seem to get my computer as quite as hot.

Even if they're supposedly designed for gaming, very few laptops are designed to run at high temperatures. At the very least, I'd recommend putting it on a table, supported on either side by a book or something.

I have a window AC as well as the floor Central Air. And The computer sits near both. I looked inside and there are 3 fans. One on the processor, (or Was that 2 if so then its got 4 fans) one pushing in air (Cool) and one extracting it.

I also have a fan sitting near the intake vent that draws in the air from the AC and it seems to help keep it cool.

at first with my new computer, the fan screamed because of the graphics card workout.

It helped a LOT to cut out the back of my computer cabinet so that the back of the computer has more open space behind it. Previously there was a "wall" behind the computer about 3 inches away from the fan. Cutting a hole so that the fan air doesn't get backpressure fixed the problem. Now the fan hardly ever kicks up loud enough for me to hear it.

My old computer had no problem with this, but the new one is a lot more powerful and puts out a lot more heat.

So make sure you have really good air circulation around your computer, especially that the area where the fan blows does not have anything near it to hinder the air flow. You should have at least 6 inches of open air behind that fan, with ventalation so that the heat has somwhere to go. Also make sure any the airholes in the front of your computer are unobstructed. Most computer designs suck air in the front and blow it out the back.

Buster

My comp has got so hot that id would reboot it self or crash cuz of this .... ... way to hot .

so Took my side panel of my comp and modded it cut holes and put a mesh to keep the real bugs out lol

then i ended up going a ordering one of tese of my sef to keep the video card cool
this may make a difference
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=120565&CatId=804


good luck

Okay, I'll try some of those ideas. I don't think I'm going to go as far as actually cutting holes into my computer , but I might try some of the other ideas.

Glad to see that I'm not alone .

My computer's always hot as hell -- I managed to go the entire winter without turning on the heat. Playing SL doesn't change things much.


That said, if you're playing SL on a laptop, you need extra cooling. Prop your laptop up so air can flow under it. Aim a fan at it. Sit under the air conditioner.

Only if I've been hangin' out with Pendari too much!


On a more serious note, yes.. my laptop does run a bit warm with SL going.

http://www.so-trickcomputers.com/

http://www.frozencpu.com/index.html?cid=prf

http://www.xoxide.com/watcoolcas1.html

BTW found these site as well .... If your a modder at att my weant to hit the modding foums to see what they say as well ... they might have more iseas that can be passed on to ppl here to help us ..

check then out these are very excellent

I used to use my dog to dry my hands, like a towel.


Now I just put them under my computer while playing second life, like a blowdryer.



Thinking outside the box will get you places

I managed to blow a 350W power supply the other day. I'd been in SL and doing video editing and encoding huge uncompressed AVIs (4GB+) into .mov files pretty much all day. When I touched the PS it was really hot, so I think I probably overtaxed it. It was a good, quiet little thing

So anyway now I got a 500W PS. It's louder but it is also cool to the touch even after running SL for several hours.

Yep. 550 watt PS here, powering a 775 socket mb and an NVidia 6800 Ultra. No need to heat the room. The case is wide open, sides taken off, and I've got two small blowers directed into it, centered on the CPU and the video card. No more thermal alarms.

Ever since I started playing SL I've had to replace my graphics card and hard disk twice.

For all of you playing on a laptop...they make a laptop dock specifically for this situation...I cant remember the specifics but it dissapated the heat significantly. I think it was called a cooling dock.

I have a dual 2.5 G5 with nine fans and water cooling on the CPU. Generally she's very quiet apart from the odd whisper, sigh or gentle whoosh from one or other of the individual fans spinning up and down a little now and then during normal usage.

Launch the SL client however and it's jet-plane mode for a few moments before settling down to a steady but subdued, background swish, with frequent spin-ups following high activity.

Heat output definitely increases significantly while SL is in use. Both processor core temps push up to around 70- 80'C for a fair bit of the time, (compared to being in the 50's) and the 6800 Ultra graphics card I had used to run at up to around 73'C core. I swapped this for an X800 recently and the noticeable reduction in heat output from that card was a welcome relief, particularly as summer-is-a-coming !

It definitely stretches the system, and to be honest, if not for SL, I would still be using my old G4 quite happily. When you think of all the streaming, rendering, GUI stuff and disk activity etc going on it's really not surprising it makes any computer break into a sweat I guess

Perhaps swim-wear is to be recommended for the comfortably ambient SL experience, and if you are using a laptop then remember to protect your legs with a towel

Carnildo isn't kidding...I haven't had to turn on the heat either all winter - just a few PCs and you've got your own convection oven. Which is nice, because then I just wear shorts all the time My machine gets nice and toasty but I have a lot of 120mm fans and such scavenged from old IBM servers that really move the air well.

Cooling can't be overemphasized when running SL. Its a heck of a CPU/GPU workout.

My desktop is positioned right under the AC, it's got an alluminum case, a number of heat sinks, and five fans (One on the graphics card, one on the processsor, one on the heatsink, and two mounted on the side to blow air in, along with a number of vents in both front and back to let air circulate. Even still, thermal alarms aren't unheard of. If I ever replace my case I'm going water-cooled. I thought I could do without it when I built this one, so I didn't allow for enough room in the case... Ah well.

My laptop gets damn hot, but not as hot as apparently some peoples. Then, I don't try to run it on full detail (View distance 64, medium terrain detail, shiney on, all other options off)

And, like Eggy, I've had an increased replacement rate for parts. Hard drives, specificly. I'm on my third new drive since I started playing SL. I also have to defrag a lot more than I used to, to keep my system running well, but that's expected.

Yeah right people, blame it on second life.

We all know why your computer gets so hot...!


T

I only play SL for a few hours, once a week, when my fresh cylinder of liquid nitrogen arrives. I hate when it runs out during the middle of a build.

Seriously though, my Shuttle fan switches to high speed for the majority of SL runtime, but it's not bad. I wouldn't count on my laptop though, even if its video card was compatible.

Reitsuki (and others), I recommend partitioning your HDs into a scheme by which temp-like stuff is managed on its own with smaller cluster sizes. I haven't defragged once since I did this (I have 6 partitions -- OS, SWAP, TEMP, USER, APPS, DATA), and my HD performance still exhibits the performance equivalent of new-car-smell. *Snifff... Ahhhhhhh*

Hey I also use a laptop. Mine got so hot it would slow everything down and I could hardly move in SL. I have a therma hard pad under it now and I bought a two fan laptop cooler that fit underneath, it plugs into the usb port and use on top of the pad. With laptops air flow is a problem. This seemed to fix mine or at least greatly help.

YES! My laptop has shut down a few times due to heat. Interestingly, I never had a problem before the 1.6 upgrade and I have run SL every day since August.

I run SL on a TABLET. Am I the first? A Toshiba Portege M200 to be precise.

I upgraded the ram to 1.5Gb but other than that it is standard. It works great.

A warning to all laptop users, regardless of using SL, having your laptop actually sat on your lap runs the risk of blocking the air vents with your clothing. Placing something simple like a folded newspaper, or a large, hardback book between you and your machine is all that is needed to maintain air flow.