What temperature CPU should run at for best performance?

[computertech82]

Both AMD and Intel have close to the same problems with heat (Intel does run hotter). Both die (burn up) at 90c (by their specs). I've seen it a few times myself.
Typically you want it to run as cool as possible. 30c to 40c is a great range to have. 40c to 50c is ok, but close to "pushing it". Rarely gives an error. 50c-60c can start to give random errors, still a little rare. 60c-70c errors increase. 70c-80c more errors show up. 90c+ kiss it goodbye. Very rare for a cpu to survive this amount of heat without damage.

Usually, the higher the temp, the more likely you will have random errors.

 

[woodchuk]

For those reinstalling heatsinks, carefully clean previous residue w/alcohol,
preferably the 90% variety, and examine the bottom of the heatsinks for heat marks or scars. If you have those you need to lap the marks off until it looks clean; I use ASA 2000 wet and dry which is almost like a medium grade lapping compound. If you are using something like Arctic Silver5 it is only effective in a thin but complete coverage coat on the contact areas. I had a Thermaltake that looked new but had some of those little heatmarks and it made a huge difference to lap them off.

 

[xSunnYx]

Got an opteron 170 @ 2600 (10x260)

Idle:37
Load:47

Might be a tad too much AS5 i guess..

 

[woodchuk]

My old XP2500 would overclock fine...below abt 44c. Over that, had random errors and rebooted on it's own sometimes close to 50, so it really matters for overclockers. On the other hand, I've serviced machines (owner clueless)
that had the heatsink totally clogged with dust, but still ran stable..go figger.

 

[Grimmy]

To give an example, that hot temps don't exactly cause errors..

I was running stock HSF my northy, and it reached 63-65C without any errors OC to 2960. With Zalmans 7700, runs pretty well 49-53C load (Case 32C).

Having good memory timings, vcore voltage, and using the right tools (software) can help in sucessful OC. Just being patient, taking your time, get info can usually be useful.

You can have a cool running processor, and yet not have a stable OC, which result in errors, lockups, BSOD.

 

[woodchuk]

Since I've seen so many hi temps on Intels I wonder if that is a particular Athlon problem. Actually this one runs stable at 11x200 so I'm not complaining, with a perfectly ordinary Athlon Barton 333 that runs good at 400. But at the upper limits of sane aircooled o/c, the lower temps helped a lot, after that it was GPU overheating that caught up

 

[thecornflake]

Errrr... 15C idle? and the case is warmer 10C warmer then that?

Okay... wateva 😀

Yeah I know. I can't figure it out.

But everything points to the CPU running very cool. Like I said, the heatsink is cold to the touch when idling. I think the higher case temp may be due to my power supply - it's an Antec truepower one and I don't think it's detecting high enough temperature as the exhaust PSU fan runs quite slow and there is always hot air coming out of it. Plus Sandra always says the fans are running too slow.

When I open the case the CPU temp goes up almost instantly by about 5 degrees and I can feel hot air around the PSU and the optical drives.

The areas around the actual CPU, Northbridge and GPU are all cool though.

The CPU in benchmark tests form Sandra rates same as a P4 3.4 which is odd.

Maybe the mobo sensors are just completely screwed!

I plan to due some investigation into different fan configurations anyway, and the first thing I plan to do is rig up a fan controller to the CPU fan and then slow it down to see what happens. I'm planning a new AMD system anyway so it won't be the end of the world if the processor melts (although I'd rather it didn't!).

 

[borandi]

My P4 3GHz 1Mb cache CPU runs at 80 degrees Celcius with the stock heatsink and fan. Is that very bad?

You CPU would melt at that tempature. It's probably a faulty reader.

My AMD 2400+ laptop runs at 94ºC Full load.. no problem!

However my X2 4400+ Oc'ed from 2x2.2Ghz to 2x2.475Ghz at 100% is 49/50ºC

 

[feky]

My CPU is 42-46 C.
The temperature in the case is 34 C.
It has a 120mm fan in it,that is fore case cooling purpose.
The HDD's temperature is 33 C.
What do think about that ?

 

[korbendallas]

Mav's P4 temp reading is probably right.
Mine is running from 77-80C according to my BIOS using the stock cooling fan and Arctic Silver 5, and that's not even under 'real' load.. given that I'm at the BIOS screen and Windows XP isn't running yet.

Right now my system is:
---------------------------------
RAIDMAX Smilodon case; 80mm back exhaust fan, 2 80mm side fans one being exhaust and 1 being intake for cycling air over my GPU, 1 120mm front intake fan pulling air over the HDD.

RAIDMAX 550W PSU. Came with the case.

GIGABYTE GA-8N-SLI nForce4 Intel Edition rev 1.1 motherboard. Flashed the BIOS today to version F6 from F5, to see if it helped out with CPU microcode and stepping.

Pentium 4 Prescott 3.0ghz CPU, HT turned on. As I mentioned, mine reports to running as hot as 80C in the BIOS.

Stock heatsink that came with the P4. I know, shame on me for using that piece of trash.

2x1gig Corsair DDR2 667 RAM.

EVGA GeForce 256mb 7950GT PCIe x16 video card, core clock 550 mhz, 700mhz memory clock (350 mhz effective per channel, or course). It runs at about 56C according to my nVidia Control Panel with nTune installed when I'm not gaming. Gets to about 60-61C when playing FEAR or Far Cry or World of Warcraft. Kinda scares me a bit to see it get that warm, haha.

HDD is some old Seagate IDE 120gig 7200 rpm drive. I hate it, and want to replace with a nice 250+ gig SATA with a nice cache, but I'm a cheap bastard and won't spend the money yet.

The other parts aren't really worth mentioning, naturally.
------------------------------------
I know I can save myself a lot of trouble if I just get like a Zalman 9700 heatsink or something and a better case with more fans made out of aluminum instead of steel. I attribute a lot of the slowdown I get from playing newer games like STALKER to the heat my machine is under, either due to insufficient air flow and my video card running too high, or because my P4 is so hot. Not to mention my crap HDD with only like a 1mb cache and it being IDE.

I've got no problems running FEAR and Far Cry on full detail at 1024x786x32@60hz and getting nice, smooth frame rates, but when I fire up STALKER and try to run it with even half detail at the same resolution it plays like garbage. I've tried looking at my RAM timings, overclocking my 7950GT, and making a hardware profile at boot to stop all nonessential services and processes, but to no avail.

I guess investing in a DirectX10 machine would be more wise than buying a whole new case and whatnot. Perhaps if I'm going to go that far I might as well save up and buy the rest of the parts to make a new PC and just sell this one for whatever I can get to some kid that wants to play WoW.

At any rate, this whole entire rant and wall of text was based around Mav's P4 running hot.. and so is mine, haha.

 

[Guest]

although a 100 degrees may burn up your cpu ive had my p4 running at 80 degrees 90 it freezes up but i know for a fact its not a faulty reader. best advice is to check the mounting of your cpu cooler, the freezer pro 7 is a good fix too, i know i had the same problem , cheers

 

[randomizer]

Great.