Super high temps with Merom C2D

[mxthunder]

The temps on my workhorse laptop machine seem to be super high. I have done some research and most people are getting 30 idle / 70 under load, but my Toshiba Satellite idles in the low 60's, reaches high 60's under moderate sufing/MS office work. The real problem starts when I run F@H on it. With two instances of it running temps approach the 100C thermal threshold specified by Intel. 93-97C usually. I have been having to only run 1 instance of Folding on it to keep temps about 87-91C.
Is this normal or what? It has been this way as long as I can remember, vents are free of dust, fan is able to vent freely.

Is there anyway for me to lower these temps? I debated on ripping it apart and using some AS5 on the heatsinks instead of the stock paste, but I really have no idea how to take this thing apart, and I dont wanna take many chances because this is my main PC that I use for school and all my daily stuff. Should I worry?

[juane414]

Well you could upgrade your CPU to a Penryn Core 2 Duo, but I don't know if that will be any easier than opening it up and replacing AS5. If its still under warranty, you might consider sending it in for repair. If its not under warranty applying AS5 is a good idea. You can probably find a guide to taking your laptop apart online. Its really not very challenging. I've done it myself a number of times. The hardest part is remembering where all the screws go! But, even with a few missing screws it will still run just fine. The third option that I can think of would be undervolting the CPU. RMclock is a nice utility for doing that. I did this on my old Athlon XP laptop and it made quite the difference. I undervolted it to 1.1v and 900MHz. It was slow as heck, but it ran passive 80% of the time and never went above 55 degrees. Of course, you don't need to underclock the clock speed, undervolting the processor will cool it down enough. Also, using some compressed air to blow the dust out of the vents and heatsink can do wonders as well!

[jmh547]

I am not familar with that perticular laptop, however, a couple years back a friend of mine had a dell that was overheating. He tried one of those cooling pads with the fans in it and everything. We eventually popped it open only to find a huge dust ball blocking one of the vents.

[petteyg359]

The T5800 on my Asus laptop idles around 60C according to lm_sensors. Haven't checked what CoreTemp in Windows reports, yet (installed Gentoo immediately after buying this and have only booted Vista to install updates, so far :p).

[juane414]

Yea dust is always a culprit for laptops. I used to regularly clean my desktop a couple of times each year. That's not really reasonable with a laptop however... Also, I don't want to void my warranty just yet :)

[benbaked]

My T7200-upgraded mac mini routinely displayed temps in the 80s celsius when folding SMP units, that was with the system fan at "normal" speeds. If I maxed out the system fan speed I could bring those temps down to the 60s. I wouldn't feel comfortable running a laptop with consistent loads giving off temps so close to the documented thermal threshold. A laptop cooling pad like jmh547 suggested sounds like a good idea for folding with that laptop. :thup:

[juane414]

I'm a fan of folding at home, but in all honesty I can't bring myself to fold on my laptop 24/7. Its temping, especially now that you can fold on nvidia cards, but after hearing about nvidia's die packaging problems I'm even more cautious. Right now my laptop is my main computer and I'm just not willing to let it run at high temps with the fan blasting constantly. I think my folding escapade will have to wait until I move back to the states and build another desktop.

[galador]

Might want to take it to a certified pc repair location recognized by Toshiba and get those stubborn dust bunnies out before it burns up your laptop.
Some of them won't go away by blowing air into your laptop outlet/ inlets.

[mxthunder]

Thanks for the input guys. Looks like my folding will be put on hold until I can figure something out. Im really not comfortable taking this thing apart, and its still under the best buy warranty so I dont want to ruin that. I just started a new semester at school so I basically need this thing on a daily basis. Maybe once summer comes I will become more daring with it. I figured out a trick to get the idle temps lower. Putting it into sleep mode and bringing it back out causes the fan to stay at 100% regardless of CPU load, so now it will idle with 100% fan at about 45C.

At least I have my desktop to fold on still, and its a lot faster at it anyways.

[madhatter256]

It could be dust. I had a P4 toshiba. All the vents looked clean from the outside and stuff, but the fan was always at maximum speed, which boggled my mind. I opened it up and found a caked layer of dust blocking the heatsink. You couldn't see this from the outside.

Also, when you fold, does the laptop feel like it's that hot? Any thing that is close to 100C is very noticeable, you can burn yourself easily. It might be a misreading from Toshiba's software...

100C is hot enough to melt some of the non-lead solder they use in laptops nowadays, which can fubar your laptop.

[juane414]

Have you tried HWmonitor? That's always been pretty accurate and reliable in my mind. It could be a misread. If it turns out that it is really hot, I would take it to Best Buy since its still under warranty.

[mxthunder]

I use core temp for realtime monitoring in the tray, and verified the temps with speedfan. I will try HWmonitor and see if it yields anything different.

Yes, in the morning, after folding all night, when I open the lid, the keyboard and surrounding area is WARM. not hot, but VERY warm. It has been like this for as long as I can remember.
My girlfriend has almost the same laptop, but a little newer, 2.0GHz C2D, not sure if its a merom, but i will install coretemp on hers and see if it yields the same results.

[galador]

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=564216
Look at post #8, as you can see just blowing air into the intake/exhaust ports doesn't mean you removed the dust.
I lost a VGA card thinking that it would.
Now I take it apart and clean it right and the temps stay between 30-55C.

[Niku-Sama]

I use core temp for realtime monitoring in the tray, and verified the temps with speedfan. I will try HWmonitor and see if it yields anything different.

Yes, in the morning, after folding all night, when I open the lid, the keyboard and surrounding area is WARM. not hot, but VERY warm. It has been like this for as long as I can remember.
My girlfriend has almost the same laptop, but a little newer, 2.0GHz C2D, not sure if its a merom, but i will install coretemp on hers and see if it yields the same results.

if it gets that hot i would make good on the warranty.

i'm thinkin what happened was all that folding caused the TIM to dry up and lose most of its effectiveness, stuff only lasts so long and when your cooking it at unreal temps all the time its only going to speed up the process.

my parents palimino socket a computer for instance always needs new TIM about every 6 months, it acually turns into a white flake, but i am not using my fancy stuff on it, i am hoping it dies i just cant stand the annoying BEEE BOOO BEEE BOOO over temp alarm and them bitching about it.

my laptop runs about 48C underload with out a fan, with a fan its about 38C. in my bios i have the option to have the fan on all the time or not but when the fan is on all the time its not going full blast its just moving some air depending on the temp. if i dont have it enabled it'll acually turn it off at a certian temp.

its different though, i dont know about your lap top but mines a Socket P with a 45nm 2.0Ghz P7350 C2D, i am sure that has alot to do with the temp

[mxthunder]

That sounds about like what my girlfriends setup is. I checked the temps on her satellite a305 last night, and it idles around 38C with the fan being on very low speed. Mine idles about 60C in the same room, and the fan is not on at all.
The best buy warranty was the biggest waste of money, i dont even wanna take it into them and waste my breath explaining the problem to them. I may just brave taking it apart and seeing whats going on in the cpu/heatpipe area.

[juane414]

I wonder if you just have a bad temperature diode (or whatever it's called) and it's giving you a false reading. I seem to remember that some of Intel's desktop cpu's had this problem. I've never heard of a widespread problem like that with mobile cpu's, but maybe you got unlucky and got a dud. It would be interesting if you could put your cpu in another laptop to see if it gets similar temp readings.

[mxthunder]

Well I have good news and bad news.

Good news is that I decided to take a leap of faith and tear it apart. Im proud of myself because I do not have much patience for small stuff like this. Found some directions online, it really wasnt that hard to do.
Bad news, nothing out of the ordinary inside. Little dust here and there. Took the heatpipe off, TIM looked decent, but i cleaned it all off and re applied some AS5 to it.
Results pending. Im posting from it right now so we will see what happens in a few hours when the temps stabilize. Right now they look about the same :(

[petteyg359]

AS5 takes a long time to cure. Suggest you use MX-2 next time :) No curing time, and okay to be a bit messy with due to no conductivity/capacitance/whatever-they-want-to-call-it.

[mxthunder]

yea... next time i will for sure. Wish I would have done more research before I bought it. The whole capacitance thing scares me a little.

Well more good news, just started 2 instances of folding on it and the temps are staying around 78*C! Thats a 20C drop in temps. Im not sure what did it, but im happy!

I do have another question though. On my CPU was some gold smudge. It would not come off, it looked like liquid gold that got dropped and cooled off on the plastic part. Here is a pic...

http://w4.bikepics.com/pics/2009%5C01%5C24%5Cbikepics-1549370-800.jpg