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sahID's avatar

How heat tolerant are current generation CPUs?

Asked by sahID (2523points) February 12th, 2015

Bomyne’s question about whether a laptop is overheating or not got me to wondering: are newer CPUs capable of running hotter than their predecessors of a decade or so ago? I remember reading somewhere that CPUs begin to experience thermal failure at a temperature of about 185 degrees Fahrenheit. I agree with this assessment because my former laptop once reached a CPU temperature of 180, and the laptop’s performance really became unstable at that temp.

When I converted the temperature readings shown in the screen shot accompanying the other question, I was shocked to see peak temperature readings above the boiling point of water! Don’t the internal circuit connections in a CPU separate & fail well below those temperatures?

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4 Answers

ARE_you_kidding_me's avatar

average CPU temps rise as a consequence of speed, scale and the resulting power consumption. open a modern pc and you will see large heat sinks and cooling fans for a reason. They can handle a larger temp range than in the past but we are close to hitting a wall with this using current architectures.

ARE_you_kidding_me (20021points)“Great Answer” (3points) Flag as…
jerv's avatar

Not much more than they used to be. Sure, running at 170F isn’t instantly fatal, but my system still flakes out around 80C/175F. I think they’ve added about a degree a year on average.

Power draw (and thus, heat generation) have decreased over the years, so idle temps have dropped a bit though, so they have a little more headroom than they used to.

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graynett's avatar

Looking after your computer entails replacing the thermal paste on a maintenances schedule at least every year. Some PC use very low quality paste from new. Replacing with a good does wonders for the speed. and temperature

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