I have an Acer TravelMate laptop.Recently I installed Portal 1 and whenever I play it, the CPU gets hotter and hotter until the computer is forced to shut down.
With normal use (and even when there's a higher CPU and/or RAM use, since the game isn't actually very RAM or CPU-consuming) it's at about 50 ºC which is perfect according to SpeedFan, but when I start playing it starts increasing and I have to be constantly alt-tabbing out of it to let it cool a bit, and when it gets to 80 ºC more or less the fan starts making a lot of noise and the bottom of the laptop gets really hot.At that point, if I keep playing, the game lags and the computer turns itself down abruptly to prevent damage to the CPU.
I'm playing with the video settings suggested by the game according to my system.
I'm pretty sure it's a hardware problem since some months ago I could play Half-Life 2 and it's episodes perfectly, without overheating or any other kind of problems. It's not happening with other games either.
These are the specs of my laptop:
Graphics Card
Intel® HD Graphics with 128 MB of dedicated system memory
Processor
Type : Intel® Core™ i3-380M processor
Speed : 2.53 GHz
FSB : 1066 MHz
Cache : 3 MB L3
Memory
4 GB DDR3