Gaming laptop setup masterclass
Chris Szewczyk shows you how to get more from your gaming laptop.
So, you’ve just taken delivery of your brand new gaming laptop. You’ve installed a couple of your favourite games and you can’t wipe the grin off of your face as you load one of them up for the first time. What if your frame rate is not quite what you expected it be though? Fear not. There are a tonne of things you can do to help you reach that FPS level needed for smooth gameplay.
We’ll go over a range of topics, aimed at helping you understand some of the basics before taking a look at key applications and settings. The goal is to have your laptop humming along with some sim-ple, easy to use methods and tools.
GAMING LAPTOPS ARE DOMINATED BY A KEY CHARACTERISTIC: TEMPERATURES
Firstly, it’s important to understand one of the basic factors influencing a laptop: temperatures. Laptops have inherently inferior cooling when compared to a desktop. You just can’t pack large heatsinks and fans into a laptop form factor. Modern hardware is more able than ever to adjust itself based on thermal conditions. All the tweaking in the world won’t be able to overcome the loss of hundreds of MHz of clock speed due to excess heat.
That last point is something to be acutely aware of. Nvidia GPUs come with an automatic dynamic clock speed adjustment function called GPU Boost. Outside of manual overclocking, it’s the most important influence on your gaming performance. If your graphics card is running within its power and temperature budget, the GPU will overclock itself. This makes temperature monitoring doubly important. So, if you want to extract the maximum from your onboard graphics, don’t be afraid to crank the fans up in order to keep the GPU at its highest possible clocks. (And use that headset to drown the noise out!) The difference between the base clock and a stable boost clock can run into the hundreds of MHz, and this can easily be the difference between an adequate gaming experience and a stuttering one.
As GPU boost is such an important function, you may want to consider the use of a laptop cooling pad. It will help keep your GPU at higher boost clocks for longer. There’s also the added benefit of lower noise levels. Large fans move more air than the tiny little screamers found in laptops.