Overheating laptop on idle (70C), not CPU load or dust or thermal paste, any ideas?

Razicator

Honorable
Feb 3, 2013
1
0
10,510
Hello! I have a Sager NP6165 (i5-3210M, GeForce GT 650M, Win 7) and under certain circumstances it IDLES at 70 degrees celsius! What the hell? This happens when I leave the laptop on with the screen closed/off (such as when I leave it in my room while I go to work). I made sure to check the CPU load was ~10% from background programs, no programs were using the GPU (even turned it off via Nvidia control panel), no major programs running, cleared the heatsink (even though when I removed it I did not see one speck of dust b/c the laptop is new), and replaced the stock thermal paste with arctic silver 5.

Yet when I come back from work, the laptop is HOT to the touch on the bottom left keyboard (right above the heatsink) and SpeedFan reads CPU at 68-70C. Fans are NOT running; they never kick in unless I'm playing a graphics-intensive game.

Any ideas or suggestions? Hell, if I could manually control the fan that would be great like my desktop, but SpeedFan does not detect any fans on my laptop sadly.
 
Solution
After a little checking around, one guy says he is running this rig @ 80c, and he wasn't complaining. Maybe it's just a hot unit. Also, turning off HT/Hyperthreading seemed to help with performance/heat and allows the GPU to run at higher clockspeeds.

memadmax

Distinguished
Mar 25, 2011
538
0
18,940
After a little checking around, one guy says he is running this rig @ 80c, and he wasn't complaining. Maybe it's just a hot unit. Also, turning off HT/Hyperthreading seemed to help with performance/heat and allows the GPU to run at higher clockspeeds.
 
Solution