Is there a way I can make render times longer to avoid overheating?

Question

Whenever I render a picture above 16 samplings with Cycles, my laptop crashes in 5-20 seconds.

Is there a way I can manually make the render time longer while not affecting the quality of the render, so it doesn't get my laptop so hot it self-crashes to not melt itself? (I'm willing to use Add-Ons and, if there is a denoiser that could make a render with 16 samplings look like a render with 128 or 64 samplings that's okay for me as well.)

I live in a very poor country and can't afford a decent PC/laptop. Maximum I can afford is something below 50$ (Which would hurt my wallet quite a lot).

Replace ur laptop. 16 sample overheat is like EN12-82 computational power. — TheLabCat, May 06 '21 at 20:39
I have a Lenovo laptop, $200 from a couple years ago, and it rendered cycles fairly slowly but not THAT bad. And Lenovo is currently like the cheapster brand that isn’t outright horrible. — TheLabCat, May 06 '21 at 20:42
Well I mean, I live in a very poor country and can't afford anything better than this. — stern38, May 06 '21 at 20:42
The best thing I could buy right now is a 10-50$ laptop (If something like that even exists). — stern38, May 06 '21 at 20:44
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/55868/how-to-prevent-blender-to-overheat-my-computer-while-rendering https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/1666/how-to-stop-blender-from-making-the-cpu-overheat — Duarte Farrajota Ramos, May 06 '21 at 21:51
None of the answers really solves the root of the problem. Ideally you should (carefully) try blowing out as much dust from the laptop if you can since it shouldn't really be overheating in the first place. You could also try a laptop cooling pad which would be relatively cheap. At any rate, just limiting the number of threads, particularly on a single/dual core laptop may not be a great help. On both Windows and Linux it is possible to set a CPU governor/power profile to restrict the CPU from running at full power at the cost of speed which would solve the problem in other applications too — James, May 07 '21 at 15:58
@pipe: The OP hasn't even mentioned which OS they are using or what kind of CPU they have, meaning there is not enough information to give a detailed answer. I suspect it might also be considered off-topic by some — James, May 07 '21 at 16:02
You may be able to fiddle with your Power settings: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/926390/how-can-i-deliberately-slow-windows#comment64586762_926444 — amonroejj, May 07 '21 at 16:59
Hi michael. Where do you live and what laptop (CPU/RAM) do you currently have? — Thomas Weller, May 07 '21 at 17:16
Just to check. Is your laptop full of dust? A cheap laptop is expected to be slow, but not to overheat. If it's old simply cleaning the dust out of the fans may help reduce overheating — Richard Tingle, May 07 '21 at 21:33
@James My laptop isn't dusty at all and I do have a cooling pad I bought about 5 years ago. — stern38, May 07 '21 at 23:20

Allen Simpson · Accepted Answer · 2021-05-06T22:02:50.480

Here is a related SuperUser post.

In Blender, you can lower the number of threads by going to Render Properties -> Performance.

Change from auto-detect and lower the number of threads.

I lowered mine to 2 and started a CPU render and it does appear to split the compute load pretty evenly among the processor cores, so one part of the chip won't necessarily be hotter than the other and it should prevent an overheat.

(This PC runs pretty hot.) :)

It's also worth quickly noting that denoising is a processor intensive task in itself, so it may not be a solution.

score 9 · Answer 2 · answered May 07 '21 at 09:40

9

Additional to the other answers, you've also asked for a denoiser - I don't know if you've already tried the Denoise node in the Compositor, it's quite good. Usually you're supposed to turn on View Layer Properties > Passes > Denoising Data with it, but testing this I couldn't see much of a difference. So to use it, go to the Compositor, press Shift+A to Add > Filter > Denoise and plug it between Render Layers and Composite.

Here an example image with node setup:

answered May 07 '21 at 09:40

Gordon Brinkmann

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Curious, is this a photo or a render? – Hashim Aziz May 09 '21 at 03:26
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@HashimAziz It's a render... that's why the image on the left is noisy without the Denoise Node. – Gordon Brinkmann May 09 '21 at 08:00

score 8 · Answer 3 · answered May 07 '21 at 07:15

8

Besides Allen's answer, which is correct, you could also try to lower down memory consumption (which is called "memory cache limit") in the blender references.