Intel Core i7 2630 running hot

Slycooper91

Honorable
Dec 30, 2013
1
0
10,510
Im playing Crysis (I know this game is hard on cpus) and its hitting 179-181 F when playing. same with skyrim or other similar games. Its a Asus n75sf (Core i7 2630 2.0GHz- 2.9GHz turbo, Geforce GT 555M 2GB video card, 8 GB Ram, with 1.5 TB in HD space) (Laptop). the cooling fan idles at 2300 rpms but iv only seen it max out at 3300 rpms. is this a problem? Whats normal maxed out fan speed?
 
Solution
Those temperatures are pretty normal for a laptop. You could add a cooling pad to give it some more airflow or you can try to set its clock speed down a bit to help it stay cooler but 80c is pretty normal for a laptop CPU that is being pushed to max for long periods of time.

jimmysmitty

Distinguished
Oct 5, 2007
551
0
19,010
Those temperatures are pretty normal for a laptop. You could add a cooling pad to give it some more airflow or you can try to set its clock speed down a bit to help it stay cooler but 80c is pretty normal for a laptop CPU that is being pushed to max for long periods of time.
 
Solution
Those temps are pretty normal. As suggested above, you can use a cooling pad to help improve airflow. However, it is not guaranteed to work on all laptops. For example, I bought a Cooler Master cooling pad for my 14" Lenovo IdeaPad Y470; it has two movable 120mm fans. It does not decrease my temps at all. However, if I place my 15.6" Dell Latitude 3540, my temps decrease by 5c.

If you are not opposed to taking your laptop apart, then you can clean out the thermal paste an apply a good quality thermal paste which can help lower your temps. Hard to say how much... maybe 4c - 6c depending on the quality of the thermal paste you use. Arctic Silver 5 has been around for a long time; it is still pretty good and also inexpensive. Arctic MX-4 is also pretty good and inexpensive as well.

You can also disable Turbo Boost. Turbo Boost (TB) can increase the CPU speed to 2.9GHz when only one core is being used, and probably a max of 2.5GHz when all 4 cores are being used. Disabling TB will limit the max CPU speed to 2.0GHz which will cut down on the amount of heat generated, but it can also lower gaming performance. To disable TB in Windows 7 go into your Advanced Power Options and set the max CPU performance to 99%.