Laptop overheating at character selection and creation

RevJJ · November 2021

My laptop regularly overheats and shuts down when I’m running ESO, but it only seems to happen if I spend too much time in character selection or character creation. I can’t create any new characters atm unless I randomize appearance because otherwise my laptop overheats and shuts down.

Any tips on how to solve this? Why is ESO using so many resources during character selection and creation?

etchedpixels · November 2021

If your laptop shuts down the ultimate problem is the laptop not the game.

Now it may be the game is triggering the behaviour, but the fact it's overheating and resetting not throttling (going more slowly) means either your laptop fans are borked or the thermal management is broken. If the machine was working properly you'd instead hear loud fans and the screens would perhaps go more sluggish.

Check with something like hwmonitor what the temperature numbers look like when it is struggling and see what is getting really hot. Check for vendor updates (BIOS especially) because whilst older systems the heat was managed by a micrcontroller on modern intel boxes it's managed by the CPU and a ton of softrware.

If its been around for a while you might want to get the fans cleaned. if its new you might want to open a support request with the vendor.

Amottica · November 2021

The first suggestion is to use a cooling base for the laptop. This should be used 100% of the time when gaming and is good to use most of the time with a laptop anyhow as they do not cool as well as desktop models. It does lower the temperature of the laptop.

I cannot say it will solve your problem.

RevJJ · November 2021

Thanks for the suggestions, will look into it! Although I’m still curious why, for example, a trial with lots of stuff going on doesn’t trigger the issue but the character selection screen does.

ixthUA · November 2021

Its due to uncapped frame rate. Use limiter like rtss.

Harrdarrzarr · November 2021

yep, my pc started blowing like mad when I entered character select, and the request chararter screen afterwards. That stopped happening when I set an fps-cap

ZOS_Bill · November 2021

@RevJJ

As a starting point, our help article linked below has some troubleshooting that can help when dealing with performance issues on a laptop.

What do I do if ESO is having performance issues on my laptop?