Gamer lowered laptop processor temperature by 15°C by simply changing the desk surface

The constrained internal space of gaming laptops leaves little room for effective cooling. That leaves owners of these machines searching for various mods and experimenting with thermal paste replacement and undervolting.

One gamer found an incredibly simple fix – he claims to have dropped his CPU temperature by 15°C just by switching the desk surface his gaming laptop sat on.

While playing Cyberpunk 2077, a game that stresses both the CPU and GPU, Redditor MentalReserve235 noticed his laptop CPU temperatures sitting between 80°C and 90°C. That's not alarming, but it's not exactly cool either.

Gaming laptops always benefit from better airflow, and placing one flat on a desk tends to push temperatures higher.

The Redditor found that switching from a wooden desk to a metal one brought CPU temperatures down to a range of 75°C to 83°C.

Switching to a less demanding game than Cyberpunk 2077 should bring even lower numbers. The GPU temperature wasn't mentioned, but it was probably already running much cooler than the CPU, so there wasn't much reason to bring it up.

Here's what the Redditor wrote:

Have been putting my laptop ontop of a metal surface - plate like (in an AC room) and it's doing wonders for the temperature. Cyberpunk goes from 80-90 degrees to 75-83 degrees. The metal surface is always cooler than the wood table surface and never get hot enough to burn your hands (which was my initial concern).

Basically the underside is actually intake so it takes the cooled air from the metal directly into your system before exhaust to the side vents (I don't know about other models but mine is like this). So if the exhausts from the side don't get hot enough to burn your hand then the metal won't.

There's one concern is that you shouldn't try to ice-cooled the metal surface because vapor can actually kill your system.

Metal conducting heat better than wood isn't exactly groundbreaking science. Still, most gaming laptop owners have to make do with non-metallic surfaces and put up with those uncomfortable temperatures mentioned above.

Worth remembering here that gaming laptops benefit from elevation, so lifting the machine from the back by attaching feet or a stand with an adhesive base can help too.

For extra gains, CPU undervolting through ThrottleStop – which only works with Intel chips – or GPU undervolting via MSI Afterburner are worth trying.