Laptop Temps...

I've just replaced the screen in an old Sony VAIO laptop and have installed Windows 7 64-bit. It's currently downloading and applying windows updates and the CPU temp is sitting around 66-68C! This seems a bit on the high side considering it's not doing much! The fan is spinning quite fast too and is a bit loud (sounds like a mini hair dryer). Does the Core i3 370M usually run quite hot?

Specs:

Sony VAIO VPCEA3S1E (Model: PCG-61121M)
2.4GHz Intel Core i3 370M CPU
4GB DDR3 RAM
ATI Radeon 5470 GPU
500GB HDD
Windows 7 x64

Does anyone else have a laptop with similar specs? What are your temps? I'm wondering if this is normal.

Put your hand over the exhaust vent - is there much air coming out from it?

If not much air is coming out - then the heatsink is probably packed with dust constricting air flow. This is a pretty common issue with laptops (the heatsinks are usually very compact with a lot of fins and get blocked easily - especially if you game on it ;)) but is a bugger to fix as it usually requires a complete strip down to get to the heatsink (unless you have an air intake vent where you can squirt some compressed air in to clean it).

Mid-60s sound quite reasonable to me - the laptop should easily be able to cope with that. Under heavy loads I've seen laptop CPUs head well north of 80, and most of my laptops seemed to idle at at least 50C, often higher. It's perfectly safe at those temperatures - the chips are designed to cope with it and laptop chassis are sufficiently small and weight constraints sufficiently tight that anything more than just adequate cooling.

If it's an oldish laptop that's been heavily used you might find it's starting to get blocked up - or worse, caked - with dust - this could explain the loud/fast spinning fan, as the heatsink will be less effective causing the fan to spin up faster to maintain the temperature. Probably worth checking the exhaust vent to see if there's a lot of dust between or on the heatsink fins. If so, find a way to clean them (compressed air might work, vacuuming the exhaust vent might work, or you might need to do a partial strip down).

EDIT: just to add, I've installed CoreTemp on my work laptop, which is a Sandy Bridge mobile i7 (dual core hyper-threaded), used on a docking station on a desk in a low-dust office (so about as ideal a situation as you can get for a laptop). It's idling in the mid to high fifties.

I have a Toshiba R700 with an i3 350M and that idles around 40-45C, the slightest bit of grunt required and it jumps up to 65-70C. Heavy usage and it's about 86C.

Bear in mind your Sony has Radeon graphics, which probably uses the same heatsink/fan assembly as the CPU for its cooling.

Thanks for the replies guys... I'm going to put this down to a bad cooling design from Sony. The vents, heatsink and fan are all clear and blowing out hot air (the base of the laptop gets quite toasty too!). The cooler itself is quite small with a small fan which needs to cope with heat from both the CPU and Radeon GPU (a single copper pipe on each connected to the same heatsink).

It seems quite a few VAIO laptops have loud fans from new after doing a bit of scanning on the net. Lets hope they got the cooling right with the PS4.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by PowerPie5000

Thanks for the replies guys... I'm going to put this down to a bad cooling design from Sony. The vents, heatsink and fan are all clear and blowing out hot air (the base of the laptop gets quite toasty too!). The cooler itself is quite small with a small fan which needs to cope with heat from both the CPU and Radeon GPU (a single copper pipe on each connected to the same heatsink).

It seems quite a few VAIO laptops have loud fans from new after doing a bit of scanning on the net. Lets hope they got the cooling right with the PS4.

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Just to check ;) did you remove the fan/blower housing?
There's usually a channel between the fan and heatsink which captures all the dust

http://farm2.staticflickr.com/1439/5...1c7520c2_o.jpg

Quote:

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Originally Posted by sam3

Just to check ;) did you remove the fan/blower housing?
There's usually a channel between the fan and heatsink which captures all the dust

http://farm2.staticflickr.com/1439/5...1c7520c2_o.jpg

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Wow! There was nothing like that in there! Just a very small amount of dust on the fan blades as you'd expect. I doubt you'd even feel any warm air coming out if it had a fur rug like that :mrgreen:.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by PowerPie5000

Thanks for the replies guys... I'm going to put this down to a bad cooling design from Sony. The vents, heatsink and fan are all clear and blowing out hot air (the base of the laptop gets quite toasty too!). The cooler itself is quite small with a small fan which needs to cope with heat from both the CPU and Radeon GPU (a single copper pipe on each connected to the same heatsink).

It seems quite a few VAIO laptops have loud fans from new after doing a bit of scanning on the net. Lets hope they got the cooling right with the PS4.

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I had the exact same problem on a very similar model (someone brought it to me because it was getting hot and throttling). Had the same problem, it was idling at 68-78

I removed the cooler and heatpipe from the cpu and gpu and saw a lack of thermal paste. I applied some new stuff and cleaned out the fan completely.

Once rebooted, the idle temps were 50-55 and the guy said that it still works fine.

Take it all a part, clean out the heatsinks take the rubbish factory TIM off and put some arctic silver 5 or equivelant on the GPU - CPU chokes and you'll see a huge difference. No more frozen peas on your laptop necessary