Processor temperature

Is 50C considered hot? My Athalon64 3200+, which is clocked up just a little to 2.3Ghz sticks around 39-40 degrees for the most part, and gets to around 49-50 when playing things like FEAR or BF2. Is that good, average, too hot? Just wondering, I don't know what to base it off of.

50C is reasonable.  Fear the 65C mark.  That's 150F, which is a typical the operating range limit of commercial processors.  Before I replaced my CPU fan, I'd hit that on intensive apps and with moments of 65C, my computer did the bluescreen shuffle.

My Athlon 1.4 is runs at 50 idle.  Running something like a pi calculator pushes it to maybe 56 though.

My (laptop) CPU routinely hits 80C+ when doing heavy tasks. My lap! It burns! It burns!

>>1
Not at all. My Athlon XP runs at 38ºC though.

>>4
Fear for your hard disk, processor, stability.

>>4

Laptops run as hot sunsuvbitches, don't they?  Don't ever let it sit on the boys unless you want to be sterile for the next week.

>>5
Stable as a rock, and the proc is now over two years old. However, what's retarded isn't the processor, it's the idiotic idea of putting the RAM dimms... right under the HD. I kid you not.

>>6
You, sir, understand my pain!

Cool, thanks for the info!

My Athlon XP 2000+, in my old shitty case with no ventilation, would idle around 64C, and when I was encoding video, would approach 89C.  Around 80C, it would start to slow down.  Shut off was 92C, I think, melting was 95C.  Once I moved it into a case with proper cooling and heat dissipation, then it wa down to 43C idle, 68C under heavy load.

My Athlon 64 3000+ idles at 28C, and will approach 43C under heavy load.  It's awesome.

My laptop is a piece of shit eMachines.  Draw your own inferences about it's temperatures.

>>4
>>5
>>6
laptop temp limits for the whole/case temp and the cpu are usually arround 90c, or HIGHER. i kid you not. i have a pentium 2 "mobile" that runs at 86c almost all the time.

as for desktop chips, 50c load is fine, as others said 60-65c is INFORMATION HIGHWAY TO THE DANGER ZONE, but if its only getting 40c idle, and 50c load, then your fine. ive been running my 2.8 p4 at temps like that since 3.0 was the fastest speed.
>>9
early athlon xp's were tiny stars, i knew a friend who blew up a 2000+ in a case with no ventilation besides the stock cpu fan and the fan in a $15 power suply, but that thing ran for 3 years at about 80c

as 9 said, draw your own inferences

Why do laptop chips run so hot anyway? Ignoring the fan, what is it about their construction that allows them to run 20-30 degrees hotter than desktop CPUs?

>>11
It's not so much the chips but the ventilation space. I don't know if you've ever taken one apart, but laptops are always packed in like crazy to get all that stuff into so small a space, leaving less room for good airflow and sizeable heatsinks. Compare that with the amount of empty space in a typical desktop case, and the typical size of a desktop processor fansink, and you can see why laptops need well-designed cooling systems and ideally processors that consume less power for a well-performing but cool laptop. The Pentium-M/Centrino chipset is a step in the right direction in this respect - good processing power:energy consumption ratio.

I know why they run hot, I want to know how they do it. Ie, people say that going over 65C is bad for a desktop chip, yet you'll find laptop chips over 80C.

>>13

They're spec'd out and designed to do so.  I'm afraid that it's likely a great deal of the "how" is trade secret material.  As for the parts that aren't, well, I have no idea.  I'd expect it to involve some significant material science, though.

I suspect (this is entirely a guess though) that the CPUs used in laptops may be clockable to a much higher speed, but that at the temperatures they are expected to operate at they would fail pretty damn fast if they were.

That sounds kinda lame now that I write it out, but I don't have any better ideas.