Windows 7 Runs 'hot'? Any Good Options To Chill It Down?

[skeezix]

(Before you say something, remember that I run All The OSes Everywhere. One of them happens to be Windows 7, among various Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OSX, and other machines.)

My main development laptop dual boots to various OSes; when I'm shipping a Windows product I do the final testing in Windows proper (not even in a VM) to make sure the 'feel' and 'integration' is top, for production builds.

This is a serious laptop, and I run the usual batteries of heat monitors (HW Monitor etc); my BIOS is set up to turn on various fans and fan-levels are various temperature threadholds (ACPI, HDD, GPU, etc).

As soon as I added a Win 7 install here, I noticed it was about (I think) 7deg hotter all the time than XP32 (and I think Vista as well was in the same ballpark as XP32.) I just assume its Aero dragging up the GPU temp and dragging up the overall temps. (And this is a badass laptop, it knows how to dump heat.)

Its not much of a concern, since its not running _hot_, its running _hotter_; I only notice it because it tips it just over my fan thresholds.. so in linux or XP32, I can run silent; boot to Win7, and the fans all kick in. Bloody annoying -- this laptop is a windtunnel when the fans kick up

(Modded Clevo, with even more serious heatpipes and such added on.)

--

I'll turn off the transparencies, but nto sure that'll impact.

OFfhand, anyone know of a site with directives on things that can be tweaked in Win7 with agoal of trimming down its thermal footprint? ie: Win7 runs much better than Vista in performance metrics so I'm not worried about performance tuning.. I'm just worried about heat tuning, somethign I've never really worried too much about

jeff

 

[Jourdy288]

For a moment I thought you meant it was stolen
I haven't much clue about Win 7, but can't you change the fan speeds through the BIOS?

 

[Pickle]

I just assume its Aero dragging up the GPU temp and dragging up the overall temps.

Try running with Aero disabled?

 

[WizardStan]

Just had a discussion around the watercooler about this.
Apparently Windows 7 does not always play nice with Intel speedstep. One of my coworkers suggested your CPU might be running hot because it's at max clock speed all the time where XP would have been throttling it down during idle periods. There's some programs you can download to check if this is the case or not, though I've not actually researched them.
There's some settings had to tweak in the bios but he doesn't remember which. A bios update may also help. He wasn't sure if AMD's feature equivalent suffers a similar issue or not. You don't mention what kind of laptop, so that was the best we could come up with.

 

[skeezix]

Its a tweaked up Sager NP5790 (ie: roughly equivalent to a NP5793 with some extras); ie: a Clevo M570RU before tweaking.

Running the X9000 variation of the Core2Duo (yes I can clock my laptop up to dual 3.6GHz if I really want to hit 100 deg celsius

(And seriously people, if you want to spend any real money on a laptop, look into custom mades and alternative companies; I mean, if you're spending $500 on a machine, its hard to beat the big guys as they have good prices. But when you spend $1000 or more on a laptop, you can sure beat the big guys prices .. A good MacBook Pro for $3k, you can whip the specs on that for half that price from someone else.)

jeff

 

[MDave]

The 2 hard drives in my laptop were the biggest cause of heat, until I did a firmware update on them (from my manufactuer's website) and not the CPU or GPU which I initially thought. The reason my CPU was getting hotter was because the hard drives made the rest of the laptop overall hotter, to the point it felt like it was burning my jeans, and the keyboard burning my hands

 

[fischju2000]

You could use a CPU-Z to make sure your CPU is downclocking correctly. Check out your current power profile and for advance settings make sure for 'Processor Power Management' that the minimum speed is 0%.

To completely disable the 3D desktop stuff, go to Personalize and select a Basic or Classic theme. Most laptops have the CPU and GPU sharing the same heatsink, so it sounds likely that this is the culprit. HWMonitor should show GPU temps if available, but so does GPU-Z, as well as GPU load and GPU speed. Load should probably be 0 with all the 3D off, and the GPU should also downclock.

 

[Fishbong]

You could use a CPU-Z to make sure your CPU is downclocking correctly.

This.

On my cheapo Athlon II laptop with x64 Win7 it works fine though, when i am browsing flash - free websites or do some office work, the CPU only runs at 700Mhz.

 

[kingoddball]

Thought of a cheap laptop cooling pad?

 

[skeezix]

I've not bothered with cpu-z on this install, guess thats the next thing to try

Turning down the Aero BS didn't impact the GPU temp at all.

The hard drives are often the hotterst part of the picture though (GPU 48-52 deg cel, hdd 52, the rest around 44 or so.)

Hmm..

jeff

 

[Javacat]

Have you checked whether there's something in 7 thrashing the hard drives constantly?

From what I recall, Vista and 7 both rape hard drives a lot more than XP (or any other OS ), although you've only said you've had the problem with 7.. I guess you could try disabling the Superfetch and Windows Search services. They are the usual culprits for slowing down lower spec PC's running Vista/7 due to hard drive abuse and don't really do much.



Psst.. I'm assuming you already know how to look for anything hammering the hard drives (or any other parts), but if not the built in Resource Monitor should be good enough to find anything. If that doesn't help there's always Process Monitor + Process Explorer if that doesn't work.