So, on October 21st I wanted to clean my laptop’s internals. Before doing that I’ve decided to write a post about temperatures under load and etc. I did. Saved it as draft and went for disassembling. And then I had a bad time while trying to unscrew several screws (I don’t have my best tools here). So, I just gave up, screwed back all the screws I succeeded to unscrew. And then just out of curiosity I tried to blow into air vents of my laptop. Really hard. Really. And I was surprised about the quantity of dust bursting out from another end of the laptop… Well… And at least for now my laptop temperature does not go over 80°C with even the most bad ass games and with even more bad ass graphics settings (I mean, games, which my laptop can run 😀 ). And on idle my computer sometimes freaks me out, when it decides to switch off the fan completely…”What? Why aren’t you working?!” But I think, I just need to get used to it. And because I had that previous post saved as a draft, I don’t want to throw it out. So here it is, with some testing results before cleaning.
Some time ago I constructed DIY Laptop Stand. One of the aims of that thing was to let air bellow my laptop to circulate more freely, thus cooling my laptop more efficiently. Several days ago I was playing Black Mesa and my computer cut it’s power off just to prevent overheating. Yesterday I was playing Portal 2 for about two hours and core temperatures reached critical 105°C. Decision was made – time for almost regular cleaning of my laptop’s internals has come.
First of all, some initial data. Right now in my room it is 20°C. I just booted up my computer after some good night sleep (computer was suspended). Just when it booted up, temperature readings were quite normal – 37 and 35 degrees of Celsius. Right now, my computer is up for about 20 minutes, and core temperatures is about 50°C. Let’s play for a little and check how fast will it rise.
After 10 minutes of play – temperature jumped to 75 degrees. Quite a lot. In several minutes temperature drops to the same ~50 °C. Right now I can’t play so much, thus for the next test I will use FurMark graphics card benchmarking tool. It will do the job. Apparently I do not have FurMark in my system, so I just downloaded FurMark 1.10.2.
So let’s begin, right now core shows temperature of about the same 50 °C. I will run Preset Benchmark: 720, because my screen is more or less the same size (native resolution 1366×768). During the test, GPU temperature reached 78 and CPU maxed at about 67 degrees of Celsius (and the score is 525, which is… kinda low…). Let’s try again but this time with no time limit… Okey… Misfortune, because (who would have known?) FurMark uses just GPU, so GPU temperature reached about the same 78 °C and stopped rising. CPU did the same.
Let’s try something else. Intel Burn Test (v2.54) it will be. Some kind of nice piece of software. Okay, starting conditions are the same, 50 degrees. Lets go. Instantly goes up to 80 °C. After a minutes or so reaches 90 °C. Both cores and all four threads are working at 100%. GPU temperature also is rising a little bit. In the third minute of the stress test, one of the cores reached 100°C. Looks like CPU cores settled down at 103 and 99 degrees maximum. They are not going over and test is almost over. Next up, Intel Burn Test and FurMark simultaneously.
Final test… System is a bit laggy… In a minute GPU and CPUs reached 90 °C. CPUs are hitting 100°C in a second minute. GPU after additional minute reached 96 °C. Ok, enough. Let’s say that is it.
Maximum CPU cores – 104 and 101 degrees. Maximum GPU – 98 degrees. Time to clean.