I used to be able to run Elite on Ultra settings on my MSI laptop, but for the last few months the performance has been dropping gradually and I assumed it may just be due to changes to the game that are making my laptop obsolete until I decided to open up my laptop today and give the fan a clean.
The fan was a bit clogged with the usual dust, but more importantly once I removed the fan I saw that the exhaust vents were almost completely blocked with dust. Girlfriend offered her hairdrier set to cool air only mode and with the aid of some earbuds I set about cleaning the vents while blowing air in from the outside of the laptop vents.
After about an hour of work the result is that I'm back to running Ultra settings at 60FPS in space although I do have to set both terrain settings to low to maintain 40FPS on planets. I'm a bit away from the bubble so I can't check performance in a station at the moment, but I'm seeing a 20 deg. C drop in temperature in GPU-Z.
Laptop specs are: i7-3630QM, 16GB RAM and Nvidia GTX 680M video.
Usual disclaimer about dissembling your laptop at your own risk, etc. MSI has a nice detailed video on how to totally strip down my particular model, so I followed that.
The fan was a bit clogged with the usual dust, but more importantly once I removed the fan I saw that the exhaust vents were almost completely blocked with dust. Girlfriend offered her hairdrier set to cool air only mode and with the aid of some earbuds I set about cleaning the vents while blowing air in from the outside of the laptop vents.
After about an hour of work the result is that I'm back to running Ultra settings at 60FPS in space although I do have to set both terrain settings to low to maintain 40FPS on planets. I'm a bit away from the bubble so I can't check performance in a station at the moment, but I'm seeing a 20 deg. C drop in temperature in GPU-Z.
Laptop specs are: i7-3630QM, 16GB RAM and Nvidia GTX 680M video.
Usual disclaimer about dissembling your laptop at your own risk, etc. MSI has a nice detailed video on how to totally strip down my particular model, so I followed that.
