I have another question, friends, but at least this one is not related to overheating (yay!).
I discovered just yesterday that all this time, even though I have an Nvidia Geforce GT 525M video card, my system has been running all my games with the piece-o-shit integrated Intel graphics chip. Two years! Two years of that card just sitting there idle while I suffer under shitty graphics settings!
So I figured out how to enable the Nvidia card as the default and opened up Minecraft. It does look nicer, that's for sure, and it can handle higher settings than before. However, I still can't turn them up very high without the game lagging horribly. So now I'm confused all over again. What is it, exactly, that my system is lacking? The temperature has dropped dramatically over the past few weeks, so the machine isn't overheating anymore -- the highest it's gone is 75 C, which is perfectly safe. So why is the video lagging when I try to turn up the settings?
If I'm reading the specs correctly, the video card has 4 GB of available graphics memory and 2 GB of DDR3 dedicated video memory (not sure what those numbers mean, to be honest). The computer has a 2 GHz Intel i7 processor and 8 GB of RAM. Isn't that... isn't that pretty decent? Shouldn't that be able to at least run Minecraft at default settings without it choking?
Can someone help me understand what is making my games run slow? When I bought the computer, a friend with much better knowledge of hardware than me assured me that for the price of $1500, this looked like an amazingly powerful machine. Yet it runs like a pile of garbage. I had assumed all this time that it was merely the overheating issue messing everything up, but now I'm not so sure. Most of the time now, it stays around 60C even when I'm playing games.
I really want to use this beautiful shader pack in Minecraft, but it just won't work. I mean, it works fine, but it feels like I'm playing the game in slow motion. It's just not usable.