Hi guys,

Just recently bought the v2 retail of Witcher 2, installed and got ready to play. Trouble is, I've tried playing through the tutorial three times and each time within 5 minutes my laptop shuts down, presumably due to overheating. The first time I'd been running on high settings without any frame rate or other performance issues, but I set it to low and it continues to happen without any change. I've never had this issue with any game before - I've run Skyrim, Serious Sam BFE, Just Cause 2, etc all on high settings without any overheating issues at all. Computer specs are posted below, which are more than within requirements - am I missing something here, or is this a known issue?

Specs:
ASUS G73J
Win 7 64 bit
Intel Core i7 (Q740) @ 1.73ghz
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 (1 gb)
8 GB ram (DDR3)

That's laptop cooling for you; it's one of the reasons I recently broke down and built a desktop for gaming. Witcher 2 will run anything hot; it will heat up a desktop that's stuffed with heatsinks and fans; a laptop just doesn't move enough air to disperse the heat of CPUs and GPUs running full-throttle. Your best bet is to play it in a cool room, and use a laptop cooler. And be sure the laptop's cooling vents aren't obstructed or clogged with dust.

Don't know just how tech-savy you are, but try taking off the back covers to expose as much as you can and use compressed air to blow out all the little dust bunnies and potato chip crumbs out of the vents and crevices. You just may find it cools itself much better!

I'll try some compressed air and see how it goes - but to be honest, I'm pretty disappointed. I can't really understand why the game runs so hot, even on the lowest settings possible. Seems more like an optimisation problem to me, seeing as performance can be fine at 60fps yet still cause overheating.

The reason you get overheating is that the game runs the GPU at full speed most of the time. If you monitor, you'll see GPU usage at 98-99% whenever there is action.

Laptops aren't built to do that, just like they aren't intended to run Folding@Home or mine for bitcoins. Especially mass market laptops like ASUS.

Nobody who does not know the game internals could tell you whether this is an optimization problem.

Get a laptop stand that has coolers. They're like $15 and are powered from a USB port.

Apart from that I don't you can do anything else to keep a laptop cool. I see you already tried using compressed air so it's no use recommending at this point that you get out the dust.