Civ makes my laptop run hot - any advice?

[happyturtle]

Civilization makes my laptop run hot. I use a Belkin cooling pad when I'm at home, but I'm going to be travelling soon and the cooling pad is too bulky to take on the airplane. (Civ is an excellent way to pass the tedious hours stuffed into sardine class, btw )

Is there anything I can do with the settings in the game, or on my computer, to make it run cooler?

I'm using a Dell Studio 1555, Win 7, Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T6600 @ 2.20GHz, 4.00 GB RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4579.

Thanks for any help you can give.

 

[civ_king]

Get a new laptop, ideally with Sandy Bridge i5 or i7

 

[Specialist290]

Dell laptops seem to have problems with running games hot, particularly the older ones. I used to have an XPS M1530 which used to crash in a matter of minutes whenever I tried to run Civ4 or Europa Universalis III on it without an external fan because the internal fan had actually worn itself out. I'm glad I traded up when I did.

 

[mintegar]

You can try limiting the frame rate to 60, as out of the box the game does, afaik, not limit it and does go as high (or fast) as the gfx can render new frames. But the limit can be set in the config file.

Another possibility is to turn V-Sync on in the video drivers.. afaik this will also lock the rendered framerate to your actual framerate..

I'd recommend doing only one of those tough, as they kinda do the same thing and A may mess with B..

Best get FRAPS to display the fps you're actually getting in game. Above meassure will only save power if you're currently getting >> 60 fps.