Notebook component temps..leave high or sleep cool often?

[huaco]

My Sager notebook is in the Sager shop over a blown video section. I'm not a gamer but my work sometimes involves some i/o and cpu intensive work on large volumes of data in the field so a good gaming laptop seemed in order when I took this job a couple of years ago. The video is about the highest resolution and speed I could get at the time. The Sager held up well to field use but two weeks ago the video died the day I got home from seven weeks in the field in Pa. I have been on a small screen, low resolution Netbook since then and it is not fun.

I normally only turn the computer off for a weekly or so pre-emptive reboot or if I know I won't be using it for a couple of days or for very long drives. It draws very little power in sleep mode, maybe 2% of running power and the CPUs, disk, and video card cool right down. In use the CPUs run about 112 to 125 F, the disk runs 100 to 110 F but the video card runs at 160 to 174 F. The video temps alarmed me at first but some Googling led me to believe that this is fairly normal for high performance video cards. I have the power settings set to sleep everything after 15 minutes of no activity mostly to minimize the time the video card stays hot but always wondered if this makes sense. Does going from under 100F to the temps the video goes to when turned on numerous times a day stress the components more than just leaving them hot? Would it make more sense to have the system sleep after an hour or three instead of after 15 minutes? Assume that if I know I won't use the computer for several hours I will manually sleep it. The real question I have is whether it is more stressful on the video to keep it hot for several hours or two cycle the temps up and down.

[Markasaurus]

The cooling on laptops is always marginal. The heat cycling you mentioned is always a factor, but if the temperature doesn't vary that much, i'd say there's no reason to leave it hot. The monitor and video card are the parts in question here, and all you have to do is set the monitor to turn off after a few minutes, instead of making the whole computer hibernate. The cpu and hard drive will be doing very little in this mode, so they'll be as cool as they're going to get. So like i said, probably no reason to turn them off by making it hibernate.

you might want to try to improve the cooling on the laptop by purchasing one of those laptop stand that has a fan or two built into it.
Also i'd consider a different brand next time - this one doesn't sound like it meets your needs.

[GIockGuy24]

The integrated Nvidia 8xxx video chipsets are prone to overheating. The separate 8xxx video boards in notebooks do a bit better. Then the 9xxx series was suppose to fix the problem but some people say they still run hot. The newer (and current) Nvidia notebook chipsets seem alright though. I don't care much for ATI video chipsets as I run Linux often and the ATI Linux drivers aren't great, though they are getting better. If not running games, the Intel video chipsets run the coolest and are easiest on the battery.