P4 overheating advice - boffin needed

[mindgam3]

I've got a laptop, its got a Pentium 4, 3.4Ghz processor.

I've been measuring the temperature recently and its idling at 60 degrees basically from a cold boot which surely is too hot to start with?

ANy sort of stress, eg running norton antivirus will take the temperature up to around 73+ degrees. Surely this cannot be healthy?

When gaming, the temps go up to around 75/76 degrees. Within the hour, negative CPU spikes occur, i.e the processor drops its speed, presumably to cool it down? This results in a performance drop in game making it unplayable for a short period of time. I know the P4's have their thermal control circuits which throttle the CPU at a certain temperature. However i've noticed with a program that this doesen't happen.

Instead, what i think is happening is the CPU is being slowed by the ACPI which controls when the laptop fans come on and cuts the processor speed when its running on batteries etc. ACPI also has a function to cut CPU speeds when it gets too hot, which I think is whats occuring.

I asked my vendor about this and they said these sort of temperatures are normal.

My question is this, if the computer in some shape or form is cutting the CPU speed, presumably because its too hot, surely that means either

a) the cpu is overheating
b) there's something wrong with the ACPI or whatever controls the CPU throttling

Any PC geeks out there want to advise me as to whether this is normal and/or what the actual problem could be as i feel this could mean somethings seriously wrong and i need to take it up with the vendor, who doesen't believe anything is abnormal about this.



>> Edited by mindgam3 on Tuesday 7th February 18:57

[Holst]

If the CPU is thermal throttling then it will perform worse.

You may be able to test this by uysing a benchmark such as "superpi"
Run the 1m test from cold and record the time.
Play a game for 40 min to heat the laptop up, then close the game and run superpi 1m test again.

If the hot time is slower then your laptop might be throttling back.

Press delete as you laptop boots and have a look for throttling options in the bios.
Im not sure if there will be as ive never had a P4 laptop.

As for keeping the CPU cooler.
If the laptop is not new then cleaning out the heatsink/fan assembly might help, but taking it to bits might void your warranty.

http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=36

[mindgam3]

But the time after the game will be slower if its throttling or not.

How else can the negative CPU spikes be caused other than the CPU being throttled, either by itself or the ACPI thermal control?

Don't want to open up my laptop as it'll void my warranty like you said I did suggest to them that dust may be causing the heat but they didnt think so

[aldi]

It sounds pretty normal, the CPU temp, cpu speed and fan speeds are all just variables in the overall cooling policy decided by the lab boys. Running the fan fast drains the battery, having a bigger heatsink makes thing bulkier and heavier. On some laptops there are settings you can change either in the bios or little app that comes with it, e.g. intel Speed Stel to bias it towards running the fan flat out or slowing the CPU down.

[mindgam3]

But as a result of the CPU throttling i'm getting a decrease in performance. WHich means I can't played games for any length of time. I paid £2500 for this laptop a year and a half ago, should I really expect anything but top performance 100% of the time? It seems a bit strange that the CPU is throttling under normal operating conditions does it not? Or am I making a big fuss over nothing?

[tinman0]

mindgam3 said:

Or am I making a big fuss over nothing?

depends whether it burns your nuts when its on your lap.

[xiphias]

Throttlewatch
Try that and see.

Also, see if there is some sort of fan calibration in the bios, it might be its not spinning as fast as the laptop thinks it is so the cooling rate is out of whack.

[omitchell]

Is this a laptop a Dell? They are renowned for getting crap stuck on the cpu heatsink and causing crap cooling, my laptop now idles around 75C because of this

[Wildfire]

Open it up, give it a good clean with compressed air, also re seat the CPU HS with some good thermal grease such as Arctic Silver. Give all the exhaust ports a good clean as well.

[agent006]

My late P3 dell C400 runs those sort of temps. I've set the processor speed to auto so it'll run slow (and cool) when it's idle and then swith to it's full 1.1ghz of raging power when required. If it's a dell you've got, look for an app called i8kfangui which should control the fans on most dell kit.

[mindgam3]

I used throttlewatch, and it shows nothing even when the CPU drops in frequency. I think this is because throttle watch only monitors the P4 thermal control and not the ACPI passive cooling which is what I think is throttling the CPU.

Its not a dell though.

I don't want to open her up as it'll void my warranty. I did suggest it might be overheating because of dirt to the vendor but they thought otherwise

[ginettag27]

The main problem is that the P4 just isn't a laptop processor, but is cheap and could
be fitted in to laptops... Even P4M processors aren't proper, but nevermind!! I've
got one, it's a Dell and it works fine.

I would suggest looking at something like these...

www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index%3Delectronics-uk%26field-keywords%3Dnotebook%20cooler%26results-process%3Ddefault%26dispatch%3Dsearch/ref%3Dpd%5Fsl%5Faw%5Ftops-2%5Felectronics-uk%5F7014477%5F1/026-2910166-1469226

I "just" searched in Google for 'laptop cooling' and the above was one of the first items listed.. They seem
to retail at about £20. I think they work, but check out some of the owners reviews..

hth

EPS