Strangestories

My favorite Pokémon is Ampharos and when playing Pokémon X I went to the area where you can fight 5 Flaffy to catch a female one, no intention of looking for a shiny. First encounter had a shiny Flaffy.

Only other shiny I’ve run across was a random shiny Rattata in Pokémon Fire Red.

Personally, I find video games about real-world wars disturbing so I don’t play them. Something about human suffering that actually happened being turned into a game rubs me the wrong way.

I spent a day tracking down a copy of Starcraft II on release day. Called every game store in my city. Two GameStop’s at the mall (yes, this mall had two GameStops) said they each had three copies so I immediately got in the car and went to pick one up.

By the time I got there the first store had sold all three copies (about 20 minutes after calling). I quickly went to the second store and they had one copy left!

So I asked to purchase it and the GameStop employee told me that the game had a subscription fee if you wanted to play online. He was actively trying to dissuade me from purchasing it and he was insistent as well. I knew he was lying and called him out on it to which he said, “Sorry, I wanted to play the game tonight as well.”

What??? Anyways I got the game and played it to my heart’s content.

So I recorded a video showing me loading giantbomb.com with the idle temp and then showing the spike as the website loads. Can't figure out how to share it, unfortunately.

Basically, my laptop was sitting at 31-33 celsius. I load giant bomb and it immediately shoots up to 68 celsius. 1 second later (literally one second later) it goes back to 31-33. I also ran intel's diagnostic test tool for CPUs and it passed everything. Thermal test even said it never went above 73 degrees.

All of this sounds like the debacle that went down with i7-7700k CPUs where loading a website shot the temps up 30-40 degrees for 1 second, then went back down to idle temps. I'm going to contact Lenovo customer support tomorrow and figure out if it's something that needs fixing. I really don't think my laptop is reaching 99 degrees.

@therealseaman: CPU usage rarely went above 70% when playing. It actually only hit 100% right when I exited the game. Still, the laptop that replaced this one would hit 100% easily but never went above 80 degrees. This one is hitting 99 degrees (again, 1 degree Away from max).

One thing I’m wondering, though...could it be that the temperature sensors in the laptop are the problem? My laptop is warm while playing games, but it really doesn’t feel exceptionally hot. Maybe the temp on the cpu is actually fine but because the sensors are reporting 99 degrees my games are being throttled? I have no idea. I heard that i7-7700 cpus had issues with faulty temp sensors. I mean, high 60s to low 70s for games on a laptop cpu seems fine. But a split-second spike to 99 which immediately goes back down to 60s and 70s? That seems really weird.

The laptop is still under warranty or else I would buy thermal paste and apply it myself. Thing is, because of my experience with lenovo’s repair services, I’d prefer to avoid that without breaking the warranty.

Well Total War spiked at 95 degrees. Guess it’s the CPU.

It’s a fairly thin laptop with intake vents on the bottom so I guess an i7 is just going to run pretty hot. That or something’s wrong with it.

Maybe I would need to be more worried if it was constantly in the 90s instead of occasional spikes.

@envane: Put the laptop on a different surface and played the game again. It starts out fine staying in the 65-75 range. Totally reasonable. But after about 30-45 minutes the game starts to bog down and the temp will spike. It hit 99 degrees this time! Absolutely insane.

I’m seeing if it’s just something weird with this specific game. Currently downloading a Total War game. Should be more intensive on the CPU. If it doesn’t hit those same temps then it’s just Supreme Commander.

I have a Lenovo ThinkPad E570. It has a GTX 950m and an i7-7500u CPU in it. Also has 16gb of RAM. I mostly use it for work but I’ll occasionally do some light gaming on it.

I tried playing an 11 year old game on it today (Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance) and noticed a lot of stuttering. If I selected a unit the game would also stutter for a split second. If I rapidly click a unit, it basically freezes the game until I stop. I decided to run a temp monitoring program and found that the CPU was hovering in the high 60s to mid 70s (Celsius). Seemed reasonable. Went back to the game, played for a couple minutes, then checked the temps again. Apparently my cpu had spiked to 98 degrees at one point, just 2 degrees from the TJ max for this particular CPU.

While browsing the internet, the temp sits in the high 30s to low 40s. However I’ll occasionally get a spike to around 75 degrees. The fans don’t usually run while I’m browsing the Internet.

Now I’d be really frustrated if this laptop has some sort of issue considering it replaced a lenovo laptop about 6 months ago that had a faulty fan and was sent in for “repairs” three times. In each case whoever was doing repairs at the depot broke a different part on it. Finally asked for a refund and bought this laptop.

I know i7s run pretty hot, but hitting 98 degrees on an older game seems excessive. Any advice? Or does it sound like something in this laptop isn’t working out?

I used the Sloth spell, applied an elemental effect, used living weapon to apply a second element which put the boss into the discord status which allowed me to beat him within 20 or 30 seconds.

Basically, I’m not sure how that fight actually goes because Sloth and discord end bosses before you can see what they can do :/

Why do “gamer” devices all have to look so edgy? I had a hell of a time trying to find a gaming mouse at Best Buy that didn’t look like an edged weapon.