What is conidered too hot for a CPU & GPU? Are my temps. o.k.?

I am worried my computer is running hot.

My GPU gets to 62c

CPU Core 0: 60c
CPU Core 1: 54c
CPU Core 0: 53c
CPU Core 0: 55c

- Sometimes the Core 0 CPU gets to 65-67.

I did that stupid arctic silver stuff myself and not sure if i did it right so now i am worried that my computer is running hot.

Are those O.k. temps?

My computer sits under my desk in a special PC slot, and i never put the side back on it, if that matters.

That looks ok to me but I usually work on server stuff..

Do you get to see the thresholds or just the current readings? If you can see the thresholds, your happiness level should stay high as long as you're not close to tripping them.

i do not know what they are. My little monitor thing only shows the current temps.

My CPU is an Intel Quad Core Q9550. And my video card is an Nvidia 9500GT 1gig.

The GPU should be fine.

The CPU temperatures should be okay, too. 67C is getting hot, but not to the point where the CPU will shut itself down to prevent damage.



Do you mean the side of the case? I'm not sure it's a good idea to run a computer with the case open. You might put it back together and see if that makes a difference with the temperatures.

I'm no expert so take this with a pinch of salt but I always thought those things could semi-comfortably get to 70C. ~60C seems pretty low. Depends on the brand I guess, AMD/Intel etc.

Most thresholds for cpu's and gpu's I've seen are in the neighborhood of 105 to 110 C. That's scarey hot!! 85 C would be about the highest I'd like to see either my CPU or GPU get. Your temps are about what mine are while running SL which I'm comfortable with.

The leaving the side off your case has been argued a few times. I say don't do it because a well designed case is engineered for proper air flow through it. The side being off of the case completely destroys that engineered flow of air. Someone will argue the other side of that I think. But if something burns up inside don't tell them you did it........you'll get a big fat "warrantee voided".

Ugh. Warranties...

DELL has been calling me FOR 5 WEEKS!!! To talk me into extending my warranty for hundreds of dollars.

It pisses me off so much that they can't just leave me alone. They literally call EVERY NIGHT. Hopefully it will stop soon.

It amazes me how these companies think that you have hundreds of extra dollars just laying around to spend on extending a warranty.

Thanks for the help everyone. I feel a lot better about my CPU temps now..It only gets that how when running SL, but thats what my computer is for.

/me usually agrees with this.. The problem is that 'good' airflow isn't always easy to do. I've had systems that ran much cooler with the side off and ones that ran much cooler with the side on..

Those temps you are fine, nothing to be concerned about. As long as your voltages are good, you shouldn't have any problems.

From what I've read, the Q9550 starts to throttle at around 95 degrees, and the chip will will shut itself off it reaches 127. The listed thermal spec of 71.4 degrees is for the Tcase, which is generally a pretty useless number, unless you're a professional system designer. There are no built-in sensors in place to read Tcase temp directly, so there's no way to get an accurate reading without special equipment. Utilities that claim to measure it just make an educated guess, based on the core temps. Core temps are often significantly hotter than the Tcase temp.

From what I understand, Intel chooses to list the Tcase max as the thermal spec because they know that if you keep your core temps below that, then there's absolutely no way you'll overheat your CPU. But in reality, the core temps can safely climb way above that listed spec, without exceeding the actual Tcase safety limit.

I only have a rudimentary understanding of this subject, though. Hopefully someone better educated can chime in, and explain more fully than I can.


As for your case, I'd recommend you close it. Potential dangers in leaving a case open are physical damage, short circuiting, static discharges, and RF interference. If you're careful, the first three shouldn't be an issue, of course, but accidents do happen. It's better to be safe than sorry, obviously. Physically, a closed case is a safer case, of course.

Physical concerns aside, RF interference can also be a real problem. If the case is open, some of the electronics will be left unshielded, free to pick up radio waves out of the air. Chances are it won't happen, but if it does, symptoms of RF interference can range from video distortion to audio anomalies to data corruption. All it takes is one unshielded wire or component to introduce stray radio waves into any electronic system.

I'd recommend you close the case, and let your fans do their jobs. As long as the case is well enough designed, you've got adequate fans, and your wiring job is clean enough not to interfere with air flow, everything will be fine.


ETA: I just noticed you mentioned your machine is a Dell. While they've made some improvements in recent years, historically Dell cases have been notorious heat traps. With the numbers you listed, I wouldn't be too concerned, but it is certainly worth keeping an eye on.

those temps are ok, sillicon starts getting weird over 70 Celsius

and lets not get F confused with C here folks (70c is 158 f)

I would be almost concerned with the cpu reaching near 67, id check for dust, and then remove the heatsink, and any thermal paste, replace the paste with something new and good (like the silver stuff) and your cpu temps should drop 10-20 degrees

I put the silver stuff. Arctic Silver 5 - i just do not know if put enough.

What i did was squirt some on the top of the CPU, and then with a business card, i scraped off the excess and left a thing smooth layer. Maybe the layer was too thin?

I was afraid that if it was too thick it would not transfer the heat properly and instead work the opposite way and cause heat to build instead of dissipate, but the laws of Thermal Dynamics are like Arabic to me.

How should i have put on the thermal paste? Maybe i should redo it.

thin is better but there is a catch and that is your heatsink sometimes they are not flat

what i usually do (unless i go nuts, which is next) is apply a tiny dot and smear it around with a qtip (which is horrible advice). I treat it like paint, just thick enough where you cant see the chip below it

If I am just trying to tweak every last ounce of power out of my computer, and have lots of free time OR if someone just handed me some major bank for assembly then what I do is take a marker, color the bottom of the cpu and get out the ole wet sand high grit automotive finish emery cloth and sand the base flat against a thick chunk of plate glass

surprising enough, most of the time shortly after you start you will see some parts of the heatsink will loose their marker coloring quite quickly, and its a disturbingly long process to flatten the whole thing out, After that you can go as thin as you like with the silver stuff (but you still need it)

lol

honestly if its hovering in the 40's or 50's under load you should not have to ever touch it

You are well within safe temps. If you really want to see how your puter runs under a load there are a few free tester/benchmark things out there. I used one called OCCT the other day. If you can pass the hour long test, your probably stable, or or or (!) you can squeeze some more clock speed.

Btw I think the 70c max is marketing(warranty related). Closing on 100c is probably where thing go really wrong, and most puter start some sort of cool down thing way before that(underclock).

thanks!

SL used to be the ultimate load tester. But now with a quad it only gets my CPU to 25% and for some reason using Greenlife it hits 48%, which is weird and i think a GreenLife bug.

Back when i had this special machine called VAPOCHILL, i had to run a program called FOLDING @ HOME because the machine had to stay heavy load for some reason. The machine had a cpu temperature monitor on it that kep the CPU at around -20c. Which was neat until my video card broke and when i took it to get fixed they found little water droplets all over the video card from the VapoChill condenser pipe which was dripping water onto the card (I guess the case did not like Illinois humidity - which is why i got rid of it.

Water/Ice/etc is not cool for computers - I will leave that to the Super Geeks.

http://vapochill.com/

Its not marketing but it is a threshold, 70 is when things start to get weird 100 is when things start entering a thermal runaway condition much past that you have a giant short circuit, but your right, the system will shut down way before that

(C btw)

With all that said, keeping your parts cool is never a bad idea despite that the temps may not be dangerous, heat decreases the life span of your parts.

I'm used to CPU temps in the 50-55C range under load though. On a personal note I always disable crap like SmartFan (Cool'N'Quiet), because it never runs my fan at it's maximum speed (2700RPM) when it needs to be.

It usually floats around 2200RPM max when it desperately needs to be higher because my CPU is overheating. Therefore I call it RetardedFan because it's actually counter productive - keeping my computer cooler is always more important than keeping it quiet.

SL causing CPU to go to exactly 25% on a quad core means it's only using one of your four cores. There's a Advanced menu option to turn on multiple threads which you should activate pretty much immediately since it improves SL performance significantly.

If cooler is /always/ more important than quieter to you then obviously you should turn off the fancy fan adjustment software. It's only purpose is to make the machine quieter.