Can gaming damage my laptop?

@Westland1940 - HP's are infamous for overall, starting out well with their cooling solutions; however the cooling assemblies they use tend to break down fairly quickly.

Years ago, we would order HP CTO's without RAM or Hard Disks that would have the onboard nVidia chipsets; however we've a different vendor now, IBM/Lenovo.

When we were using HP, we would work with a specialty manufacturer to create a non-OEM variant of the HP cooling assembly designed by our own engineers each time we placed an order, and while we still have a relationship with our vendor to provide us with custom designs of parts we may need, we no longer obtain the re-tooled versions of the HP cooling assemblies we designed, and at this point, all of our own designs for HP Laptops' cooling assemblies would be for models that are now outdated.

Custom parts manufacturers are available online, but they can be difficult to find. For professional reasons, we can't post specifics about the one we use, and most will only work with large orders or businesses. There are exceptions, so please feel free to run any names by us in a PM should you wish to make an inquiry about one you find that will fulfill small orders.

So, Yes, playing games can "eventually" cause damage to most laptops, not just HP. What we miss about HP is that they were actually really easy to maintain compared to our CTO IBM/Lenovo's, and in all honesty, replacing the cooling assembly in HP's is surprisingly easy in our own opinion; however we always recommend using a professional A+ certified technician for any maintenance, and not to do the maintenance yourself.

If your laptop is relatively new, it's also possible the cooling assembly you have is just not in great shape out of the box, so you may want to consider getting it replaced.

We always recommend maxing out RAM to full capacity with the highest speed RAM that is compatible with any laptop; however there's a tradeoff that varies significantly between hardware builds; especially CPU vs. GPU, and that is that while CPU heat levels will go down with more RAM, it's not always a significant change while at times the added RAM will also achieve some additional heat as well. For past HP's, where the RAM was installable from the bottom, and fairly far away from both the CPU and onboard GPU chipsets, maximum RAM that was configured at the highest available speed would often even out the temperatures nicely, but also bear in mind, we've never used AMD CPU's and have always used Intel CPU's exclusively. In short, we've little experience to share when it comes to AMD CPU driven models, but we'd be remiss if we didn't point out that upgrading to maximum possible RAM is more often helpful than not helpful to at least allowing for some lowering of temperature during operation. Something is always better than nothing.

Laptops do heat up pretty fast; even for us running things like AutoCAD and other 3D applications, so having a fully functional cooling system is always of paramount importantance.

One thing to also try, go into your Power Configuration, and set the cooling fan to "Active" instead of "Passive" to keep it always on, and invest in an extended cell battery to make up the difference in power consumption. Anker makes a great series of extended cell batteries that are compatible with a vast array of HP laptops.

Best of Luck,

SLI - IT-IS Team

jimbo45 said:

I doubt though in normal use that a gaming machine would fail -- the keyboard might if you are a robust "Two finger type keyboard user" !!!.

This is so funny, but I agree!