Overheating Issues with a 4GB GDDR5 MX250 processor

@PanchoStingray  There are a few things going on here.  First of all, it's completely normal for Sims 4, or any game, to drain your battery.  An hour and a half of battery life while playing is actually better than many gaming laptops.  But even aside from the short battery life, you should always play with the laptop plugged in for performance reasons.

Some game launchers will use the resources of a dedicated graphics card while open.  I don't know about Epic, but Origin definitely does this.  It's not ideal, but it's also not a sign that there's anything wrong with your computer.

The heat is a different issue.  I don't know how hot your laptop is getting, but any computer will run hotter when you're playing than when you're browsing the web or doing other low-impact tasks.  The question is whether it's heating up too much, and that's impossible to tell without seeing some realtime hardware readings.  If you'd like me to take a look, download hwinfo from here:

https://www.hwinfo.com/download/

You don't need to install anything if you don't want to; just choose the Portable version, unzip it, and launch it from Downloads or wherever you want.  (If you would like to install, be sure to click the green button, not the orange one.)  Restart your computer, and don't open any other apps.  Launch hwinfo, choose "sensors only," and click the icon that's a sheet of paper with a + sign to start logging.  Save the file to your desktop for easy access later.

Wait five minutes, then launch Sims 4 and play for at least 20 minutes.  Click the same button to end logging.  Then upload the log to a third-party free filehosting site and link it here.  Please leave it in .csv format, or if you use OneDrive to share, please compress it in .zip format instead.

Please also run a dxdiag, so I can see the status of your graphics drivers, as well as other software-related issues that might be present.

https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/pc/how-to-gather-dxdiag-information/

i actually tried a hwinfo, the results are here-i don't understand most of the numbers:

https://1drv.ms/u/s!Au3udkx_YrQ9ghuQwX0ykqS0NGVB?e=9bGz9G

about the dxdiag-i don't know why, but actually running one doesn't appear as an option for me. if there are conditions to run it,tell me. thanks for the reply though.

@PanchoStingray  Your graphics card is actually running quite cool, at least for a laptop card: its temperature never went above 67° C and mostly stayed between 60 and 65.  Anything below 80 is fine; above that, the thermal throttling will likely significantly affect performance.

Your processor does run a bit hot at times, running as high as 95° C.  But it's not really a critical problem—thermal throttling kicks in, the CPU slows down and therefore cools down, and then things are back to normal.  The processor itself averaged 70° over the course of the log, with each core averaging more like 65.  So you get an idea, here are the readings for the CPU overall and for one core:

So CPU use and temperatures spiked in the first couple minutes, maybe when you were loading TS4, which would be normal.  Temps settled down as you played, except for one moment 21 minutes in.  I don't know what you did at that point, but something drove up the temperature, and this time, it wasn't actually overall CPU use.  At any rate, you can see that the temperature dropped again as thermal throttling kicked in.

Without knowing exactly what's happening when your laptop warms up, I couldn't begin to guess the causes, but it's possible that something running in the background caused the brief spike and also accounts for the other times you notice the laptop being warm.  Among many causes is a script running on a website, for example I've noticed high CPU use, relatively speaking, on certain sites that have embedded videos that I'm not watching.  The next time you notice the laptop getting warm while you're not playing, you can check out CPU use in the Task Manager and see if one app or another is using too much.

I really wouldn't worry about it though.  From the hwinfo log, your laptop is handling its temperatures quite well and will throttle when necessary.  That's what it's supposed to do.  You can use hwinfo to monitor temps yourself if you want, and it's not a bad idea in general; I keep it open whenever I play anything and take a minute to look over the readings when I'm done, just to make sure there's nothing wrong.  But you don't have to log, you can just keep an eye on the average and maximum readings.

P.S.  To provide a dxdiag, you just hit Windows key-R, enter dxdiag in the box, let it finish running, click Save all information, and attach the resulting .txt file to a post.  I'll look over yours if you want.  But it doesn't sound like there's anything seriously wrong with your system.

I didn’t know that it ran on average temperatures like this, but it seems like the plastic frame that causes it to actually feel hot or something. But if I am to reduce the temperature to an even lower level, can I undervolt the processor? And if I am to squeeze more frames, can I overclock the gpu? Am actually new to this thingy, but I don’t actually know how is it done, but I actually own nvidia apps that can offer the “overclock” feature and stuff. is it safe? Am I bound to burn the motherboard in the process? I don’t know if I can overclock, as my card is actually not locked to 10W, it is the 25W model. Sorry if it is a lot, and thanks for making it much more clearer than I thought previously. 

@PanchoStingray  You could absolutely undervolt the CPU and overclock the GPU if you wanted, and provided the laptop's BIOS supports any settings you'd want to implement.  But be careful, because the wrong setting can mess with any computer, up to the point of bricking it completely.  I'm not trying to scare you, just saying definitely do your homework first, and make incremental changes rather than large ones.  It's also a good idea to monitor temperature and usage stats in hwinfo (or another app, if you prefer) so you can see a small problem before it becomes a big one.

I don't think it's necessary to change any settings though.  If you're really worried about temperature spikes, a cooling pad would help without your needing to tweak anything internal.  Overclocking a GPU is simpler than messing with CPU settings, so it's generally safer.  But your card isn't all that powerful to begin with, and if you burn it out, you won't be able to replace it.  So unless you're really craving a few extra frames, it might not be worth the risk and effort.

Having said that, I've seen anecdotal evidence that lifting the 10W limit on your GPU model makes a noticeable difference and is mostly safe.  At least Nvidia makes it relatively straightforward; the question is whether HP software would interfere.

If you do decide to go forward, be sure to get info from people who have your exact model laptop, as opposed to another brand, because all kinds of settings will be completely different, and the outcome may be as well.