Laptop has abnormally low FPS in games

[metadingus]

Hi,

My laptop is a couple years old now, and I am fully aware that it's getting pretty dated tech-wise. However, even a few months ago I was able to run Bioshock Infinite on medium settings with almost consistent 60FPS (some drops in the big fights). I also used to be able to run League of Legends with upwards of 100 FPS on high settings.

Today however I cannot get League of Legends to /maintain/ 30 FPS even on low. I recently purchased Metal Gear Rising, and according to fraps, have been meandering around 15 FPS. In an attempt to remedy this, I recently updated all of my drivers, at least everything that SlimDrivers can detect and also have done full sweeps with anti-virus, anti-malware and anti-rootkit (took out some pretty nasty stuff actually). While other aspects of my laptop are working nicer (booting up faster, explorer more responsive, etc) games are still suffering in the FPS department.

These are my basic specs:

Model: Asus Notebook K53SJ, K53SV series
Processor: Intel Core i52410M CPU @ 2.3GHZ
6 Gig of Ram
Graphics Card: Nvidia Geforce GT549M Cuda 1GB

While my stuff is definitely getting on the lower end by today's standards, I should be able to run MGR with decent FPS, and should definitely have acceptable framerate in a game like League of LEgends.

This is especially puzzling since the drop in FPS has mostly occurred in the past few months.

Thanks for any help, and let me know if there are any scans/reports I need to post up here..!

 

[james77]

You might want to check your temperatures, and have your laptop cleaned. A possible cause of this problem is that there are dust stuck in your fan that prevents your heatsink from cooling down, thus, underclocking your GPU to prevent burning.

 

[metadingus]

You might want to check your temperatures, and have your laptop cleaned. A possible cause of this problem is that there are dust stuck in your fan that prevents your heatsink from cooling down, thus, underclocking your GPU to prevent burning.

What temperatures would you say are in the safe range? Is there an easy way to clean out the laptop myself, or do I need to bring it to a shop?

 

[james77]

You might want to check your temperatures, and have your laptop cleaned. A possible cause of this problem is that there are dust stuck in your fan that prevents your heatsink from cooling down, thus, underclocking your GPU to prevent burning.

What temperatures would you say are in the safe range? Is there an easy way to clean out the laptop myself, or do I need to bring it to a shop?

Around 60°C is safe for me. You can download this to check your temps http/www.gputemp.com/

If you see your temps going as high as 90°C while playing, then you might want to clean your laptop. You can clean it yourself or have someone clean it up for you it's not really hard, you just have to open your laptop using a screw driver and then remove the dust on all the fans inside your laptop.

 

[metadingus]

Update:

I cleaned out the laptop internally, and as you predicted the temperatures have decreased (they were at 90c at almost all times earlier) and now range from 72 to 82. Games are going a lot smoother now. Guess my question is if there is any reliable way to get the temperature even lower, or to make sure it stays low?