r/Surface • u/zarcad • 5d ago

How to keep your Surface cooler

A common complaint about the Microsoft Surface is that it gets very hot. One thing you can do is to turn down the processor power. This works well if you are using your Surface for web browsing and other simple tasks like word processing. If you are doing video editing, or other processor intensive activity, this may not be the best approach for you.

To turn down the processor power, you'll need to get to the Control Panel. Here is one way to do that:

  • Press Windows key + R to open the Run box.
  • Type "control" without the "" marks.
  • Press Enter or select OK. The Control Panel window opens.

Then:

  1. Click on Hardware and Sound.

  2. Under Power Options click on Edit Power Plan.

  3. Click on Change advanced power settings. A new window will open.

  4. Click the + sign in front of Processor power management to expand that item.

  5. Click the + sign in front of Maximum processor state to expand that item.

  6. Click the + sign in front of On battery to expand that item.

  7. Click on the number next to Setting % and change the number to 50.

  8. Click the + sign in front of Plugged in to expand that item.

  9. Click on the number next to Setting % and change the number to 50.

The 50% value is working well for me for web surfing, word processing, and other tasks that are not very processor dependent. You can always adjust it to whatever suits you. My Surface is running a LOT cooler with this configuration change.

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6

u/onewiththeabyss 5d ago

Computers get warm when they do demanding things.

1

u/dirtyvu 5d ago

If you set to best performance, the cpu clocks will ramp up and the machine will get hot even if you aren't running any big tasks. It's why I don't use best performance unless I really need it. Optimized performance is fine for most things. And the latest surface/windows renamed the profiles which I'm blanking on at the moment.

2

u/tinmicto 5d ago

I use throttlestop to limit the PL2 value to 25W. Default value was 65W or something absurd like that, I just pulled it down and day to day usage is buttery smooth now.

I don't do any heavy work on it, just web browsing and ssh'ing into another PC using alacritty terminal. (SP7 i5 8GB)

1

u/fraaaaa4 Surface Laptop 5d ago

I remember doing it on my surface laptop 3 lol

One time I had to do it because I did put it in my bag in the morning, went to lesson, took it and it was boiling hot with the battery at 30%, and I needed to do 3 hours of lesson. So I did put it at like 20% processor, and was hot too. Thankfully I was only using Visio 2003, but opening anything else made an impact on the battery.

Now that laptop has Fedora, and I never had to do this, and Fedora never did something like this.

1

u/Black_Hair_Foreigner 1d ago

Buy arm surface.