Laptop Keeps Force Restarting due to "Heat"

Conan Exiles General Discussion
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Before I start, if I’m in the wrong thread, please direct me to the right one. If so, anyone who helped me, I would really appreciate it.

Now that’s out of the way, lets get down to the nitty-gritty.

So, I’m using an Omen 17 Laptop, with a GTX 1070, i7 7700HQ CPU @ 2.80GHz. This laptop, I’m fairly certain, can run Conan Exiles on high pretty well, correct me if I’m wrong. I’ve been able to play games that has a more demanding graphic requirements than Conan Exiles, and yet, my laptop doesn’t force restart due to heat after a long session.

Before you ask, no, my thermal vents aren’t clogged. My fans aren’t clogged with dust or any of the sort. I’m using an external fan at all times whenever I’m home. I’ve done stress tests with other demanding games on high, put it on for more than 8 hours and my laptop still ran, with an average CPU temperature of 80C.

This hasn’t been the first time that has happened, but I’m starting to feel like this won’t be the last time. Typically, I’ll play this game with a friend on Singleplayer/Co-op for a while, usually up to a couple of hours, more or less. I keep a watchful eye on my temperatures with MSI Afterburner, and the CPU temperature averages around 75C, whilst my GPU is around 60C. Throughout my gameplay, I have not encountered any stuttering, tanking frames and any of the kind, but at the 2 hour mark or so, the screen will turn off, and my laptop will shut down. Upon rebooting the laptop, it says that the temperature was exceeding its limit of 90C, when in actual fact, the CPU temperature was around 78C. I checked MSI Afterburner, it says the CPU temperature was 60C.

Now that I’ve covered the flow of my game play and/or identified the problem, I’ll go a bit more into the technical side. JUST TO BE SAFE, I ticked the Low End Laptop Mode, and I’ve put everything on the lowest possible settings. Both settings had the same results, if anything, it lengthened my game time to about another 30mins or so. I put my FOV to the lowest, I made sure that only Conan Exiles is the ONLY application running, if I were able to close Steam or Discord, I would, but I can’t sadly. I’ve even went to the HP Support Assistant and wrote in their forums. I went ahead and updated my BIOS, my thermal drivers, everything they had that I needed to update, I updated them all. In short, I’ve done everything I can to try and help my situation, but it seems like none of this even matters. I’m at the stage where I feel like I need to re-apply thermal paste on the CPU.

If anyone has the slightest idea of what’s happening, please leave a comment. I really enjoy playing this game, but its the fact that I’m forced to play this game within an undisclosed time limit puts me off of it. If anyone knows one of the devs and can tag them in here, that would be appreciated. In short, any help would be stellar.

I thank anyone who leaves a comment!

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are you on windows 10?

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You obviously need to find a B’aru Heavyhand to make you some Flawless Darfari armor. Always beats the “heat”.

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Sounds like you and I are chewing the same dirt.

I’ve been playing on PC since early access with similar specs as your laptop and CE has always had a most unusual draw on my system. I’ll mention here that, like you, this is the only game I have that puts this much stress on my system. All my other games play cool as Haagen-Dazs and none peak out my gpu usage on ultra settings.
Also, adjusting the graphics settings in CE between medium and ultra shows no major difference in quality.

I checked and rechecked my gear and drivers, then I tweaked settings within the game and eventually managed to get the gpu temp down into the low to mid 40’s c and the gpu usage down to fluctuating between 45% with spikes to 70% with CE.

However, following the mounts update and making no adjustments to my pc settings, the gpu temp shot back up into the mid 50’s c and the gpu usage spikes from 50 to 100% where it remains after trying further tweaking. No noticeable changes in video quality.

I know, weird, right? Since it happens to other people on differing equipment, it only happens with CE, and an update can have a direct effect, it leads me to conclude that the problem must exist within the game build.

Currently, I can’t even play the game following a patch to the mounts update due to the game’s performance taking a nose dive.

So, if you find the fix I’ve been seeking for over a year, please let me know. I’m burned out from looking and I don’t even fire up the game until there’s an update, patch, or hotfix which seem to be the only variables that have made a difference. Some have made it better, some have made it worse.

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Have you ever run a Superposition on your machine? I know how competitive you are with PC stuff, so it might be a good/bad tool for knowledge. UNIGINE Benchmarks

It runs a version of a 3D game and scores your setup. It also does other tasks.

With Conan, I find it’s very important to keep the PC at about 100% of its power threshold, or 83C-93C, to keep the card operating with enough overhead for the game. I believe you run a 2070 Super, it would be interesting to see your benchmarks.

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Thanks for the link. I never ran this particular program, but I’m curious to try it and will when I get a few minutes all in a row to putz around.

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I played on the same specs for a while (was a MSI notebook). Never had this issue.

This. You have to do that on notebooks as well. I suggest using Arctic Silver V. Also do it on the GPU chip. Also make sure your VRAM is covered in those thermal pads that feel like soft rubber.

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Could be a bit late but, is your fps unlocked? If your fps is unlocked using laptop mode will still hit thermal restart because CPU will put same amount of work or even more (heat output/power draw can be different since workload is not the same)… You are already running afterburner, so use RivaTuner as well to track temps while in the game, by the time your PC restarts, temps will drop.

You can always try to limit fps and lower settings to lower heat. Conan is badly optimized and got even worse way back when funcom applied “console” optimizations (with first combat update).

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On specs alone, yes. But before we go further, we have to get one thing out of the way.

Manufacturers of components (individual ones, such as the CPU, GPU, etc.) design them to run at 100% capacity for the duration of their lifetime. Which is about 5-10 years. Many go much longer, and those that fail before that time do so because of a defect.

This is assuming proper airflow, grounding, and other outside factors such as moisture or impact being affected.

This means those components you listed should be able to run Conan Exiles fine, like you said. So what’s the issue? Laptop manufacturers. Specifically the ones who designed the structure of your laptop did not design them with proper airflow in mind. Their line of thinking is that laptop users will not use components to 100% like PC users would.

To put it simply, they put to hot an engine in the frame of a too small of a car. The only possible fix here is if the laptop is under warranty, to send it back or possibly get a refund.

To reiterate, those components inside are fine. They just need a better case/frame for better airflow. It is impossible for a game to overheat components that are properly cooled. As I said, they can run at full capacity for years, not months, not days, not hours, but years. Your components are designed to play Conan Exiles (actually far more than just CE) for 5 to 10 years, IF they are properly housed.

Unfortunately laptops are not normally properly housed and cooled. I’ve personally had luck with MSI brand laptops from the retailer XoticPC who tests the laptops before shipping them out to ensure there is no heat issues. They are a little pricey though.

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There are many things that could be causing this.

Old thermal paste can very well be an issue and it may not be allowing for the heat to be as efficiently transferred away from the CPU heat shield as it should be.

It is possible that the game is causing an overheat, it could be that a fan isn’t working properly or is cutting out when it reaches a certain rpm or load, have you tried running any stress tests with the bottom panel open to make sure fans are working as they should? Make sure all fans are spinning during high extended load.

I know you said it is clean of dust, just to confirm are you saying this because you recently blew it out with compressed air? or do you mean you can’t see any dust clogging anything? Dust can be tricky with laptops and really you can’t always tell how clean it is from just looking at the components, they may appear clean but when you blow them with a can of compressed air a cloud of hidden dust can still appear.

Something else but much less likely is a problem with the onboard sensors which are tracking the heat of the device, can you actually feel the laptop getting hotter? or do you suspect it isn’t really reaching overheating temps? A false reading from the sensors could trigger the overheat shutdown protocol even when the device isn’t running too hot.

I will say that 80c is pretty warm and is getting to the limit of what I would say your i7 7700HQ should reach, They say those CPU’s can operate at 100C but that is really pushing it, anything that gets to high 80’s and that gets to 90/or higher is too warm in my opinion.

It is also possible that the MSI afterburner readings you are getting arent fully accurate, they should just be readings that are coming straight from your board sensors but just to make sure try HW monitor to compare (it’s free and easy to install) and then just make sure both apps are giving you the same kind of temp readings. HW monitor is also really useful as it gives you a full breakdown of all your components, from temps to power usage to memory utilization. It will tell you the temperature and power usage of each hard drive and ram chip etc, I generally use it as my go to component monitoring software.

Some further tips for if you are dealing with an overheating problem, I am sure you aware of this but don’t allow laptop vents to be blocked so resting it on a bed or any kinds of linen where the vents are direclty on the material will block them, also mounting the laptop on a sturdy surface that raises it above the table slightly can also help (many laptops vents work inefficiently as they are so close to the table surface and don’t have enough open space to transfer heat away from the components). If you are using a specific external fan that the laptop rests ontop of those are perfect. Just make sure it is spinning at a high enough rpm to provide adequate cooling.

Something you can do from the BIOS, but if you are not very versed in such things then I don’t recommend playing around too much and rather using a third party program like SpeedFan for windows, is to change the rate at which your fans will spin in reaction to component temps, increase the rpm reaction to changes in temperature.

Another thing that could potentially be a culprit is that if when it first started overheating, some damage may have occurred, this damage can make it more susceptible to overheating much easier in the future which is where you may be currently now and why it seems that it is shutting down before it actually gets too hot.

This may sound silly but is the charger in or out when this occurs? the reason I ask is because sometimes the laptop struggles to supply power to the components under load and so when it is on battery this compounds the problem and makes the laptop work harder to provide the necessary power and can cause a runaway heating effect.

I see you are using an GTX 1070, I am assuming this is a GTX 1070 that has been integrated into the mother board and not an external GPU? Or do you have the GTX 1070 as an external GPU and also have a integrated GPU on the board?

What power profile is your laptop using at the moment? balanced, performance or power saver?

It is hard to diagnose such things without being able to troubleshoot and see the machine myself so forgive the many questions of which some probably won’t apply to your situation

I have worked in this industry for a long time now and in most cases the longer the overheating problem goes unaddressed the worse it gets as components slowly get damaged over time which in turn can make the overheating worse and that cycle can go on until component death. Atleast you say that Conan is the only application that causes it to force restart due to overheating. I would say just monitor and make sure that the problem doesnt seem to spread to other games or activities you do on the laptop. Maybe do a bit of a run through of your other high performance games and let them run for a few hours to confirm and make sure it is just Conan doing this.

Sorry about the essay… lol

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This Alienware laptop runs cool as cucumber, I guess the 5 fan cooler underneath was worth he money.

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The lights dimming whenever you turn it on are also an added bonus :slight_smile:

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Alien technology is more advanced than Earthling tech. Perhaps you should try to reverse-engineer it and use it against the aliens.

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