Best practices to maintain your gaming laptop, preserve battery life and get maximum performance.
A lot of users for several reasons prefer a gaming laptop over a desktop mainly due to the portability feature. However, gaming laptops require a lot of care and precautions to be taken to get the best experience out of them. In this article, we have listed some of the best practices to maintain your gaming laptop properly and extend its lifespan.
Best practices to maintain your Laptop properly
- Cleaning your gaming laptop thoroughly
- Gaming while not plugged in
- Placing your laptop appropriately
- Undervolt your Laptop
- Keep your laptop up to date.
- Game without Optimus
- Handle the hinges with care.
- Bonus Tip
1. Cleaning your gaming laptop thoroughly
Just like any other luxurious belonging of yours a gaming laptop also deserves your attention and care. It requires good hygiene to produce a desirable performance as the dust may get collected into the hardware affecting its performance. Cleaning your laptop not only helps avoid performance drop but also promotes low temps as the airflow is much better as dust may block the air from the fans.
It cannot be stressed enough how important it is to clean your Laptop. Cleaning your Laptop regularly will not only make it look better but also help it perform at the top level.
- Donβt hesitate to try to get all the dust out by opening the back of the laptop.
- Clean the fans thoroughly.
- Replace thermal paste(every 6-8 months).
How often should you clean your laptop?
One must clean his laptop thoroughly once every few months and this mainly depends on the environment the laptop stays in if the room or the place is too dusty then doing it once every two months is highly suggested.
2. Gaming while not plugged in
Gaming demands a lot of power from your laptop and to game on battery power simply isnβt recommended. It can cause various issues like shortened battery life, damage to the laptop battery and reduced performance. While plugged in the laptop performs significantly better as it is able to draw as much power as it needs without burdening the battery. Hence, it is always recommended to game on your laptop while being plugged in.
It is not necessary that the laptop is getting charged, you can switch to the βplug-inβ mode and directly feed power through the port. This is highly recommended as it will not only boost your performance but also preserve the lifespan of your laptop
3. Placing your laptop appropriately
This may sound like it doesnβt make any difference but it actually matters a lot. Where you place your laptop may affect the temperatures of your laptop a lot. If the laptop while gaming is placed in such a way where its exhaust fans are getting blocked it may start to overheat due to the negative airflow. It is quite important to ensure that the hot air from the laptop is exiting your system easily allowing better airflow and temperatures. An additional tip would be to keep your laptop on a vertical stand as reduces temperatures by 5-degrees.
4. Undervolt your Laptop
What is Undervolting?
Undervolting is a process through which the voltage being supplied to the processor or other components (in this case GPU) is decreased. It simply reduces the voltage being directed to the components. Here in this case we will be working on reducing the amount of voltage your graphics card receives at a particular core clock speed.
Why you should undervolt?
Undervolting can have various positive effects on your laptop some of them are listed below.
- Improved battery life
- Increased life span
- Better temperatures
- No performance loss
- Less noise as the lowered temperatures lead to quieter fans
If you need any more help regarding undervolting refer to our complete guide about undervolting CPUs and GPUs.
5. Keep your laptop up to date.
Keeping your laptop updated altogether is absolutely crucial as it provides better features, fixes bugs and makes windows faster. This includes updating windows, applications from the Microsoft store, BIOS and GPU drivers from Nvidia or AM.
6. Game without Optimus
A lot of gaming laptops come with both integrated and dedicated graphics. The Optimus is GPU switching technology which switches usage from integrated graphics to the dedicated GPU whenever necessary. The integrated GPU is for low-power tasks while the dedicated GPU is required whenever more horsepower is required.
With Optimus, the Dedicated GPU renders the frames and sends them to the integrated GPU and then that sends them onto the screen. The iGPU acting as the middle man in the rendering of the frames affects the performance. In order to work around that βmuxβ switches are used to switch between iGPU and Dedicated graphics whenever needed.
What to do if your laptop doesnβt have a mux switch
In case your laptop doesnβt have a mux switch an alternative can be to plug your monitor into an external screen. While rendering the output onto an external monitor the Dedicated GPU directly render the frames and utilizes the true powers of your Dedicated GPU.
7. Handle the hinges with care.
A lot of popular gaming laptops require you to handle them with care as their hinges may break over time if not handled properly. The best way to avoid this from happening is to not open the lid harshly from the corners and apply too much pressure onto those feeble hinges instead open the lid calmly from the middle so that the pressure is equally spread on both the hinges. Gaming laptops arenβt cheap and you must treat them like the luxurious item they are.
8. Bonus Tip
In bonus to all the above tips if you own a low-end Laptop and are looking to improve performance, here is our guide on how to make your windows faster than ever and completely optimized for gaming.
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