Is it okay that my CPU temperature more than 50 Celsius at low load/idle?

50C is roughly 122F.

That’s a tad warm for a Clarkdale i3 (mine idles around 43C/110F), but ice-cold for an old Northwood Pentium 4 (my old P4 idled around 57C/135F). Phenom II’s tend to run in-between; a little warm, but are generally fine until you hit the mid/high-60s. So you’re okay, but I’d still give your system a little blast of air or something every once in a while to knock out the dust bunnies.

FWIW, my video card reaches ~88C/190F under load.

Typically, AMD CPU Operating Temperatures range from 30 to as high as 80C. You should start to worry if the temperature reaches 70–80 when ‘just browsing web”.

@jerv @Smitha When playing games, sometimes it would exceed more than 65 degree.
I use Core Temp and set the overheat protection to 65 degree, is it too low?

No, 65C under load sounds about right.

AMD says MAX temp at 62’C

For some comparison I have a 2500K OC’ed to 4.21 and at idle it is around 30C. At load up to around 55. I also have a EVO 212 cooler so stock will be a bit warmer.

I would open up the case and look for dust on the fans. And also check that the fans still actually work.

This is from my moms computer. I had botched putting the cooler on her cpu (left obviously) which led to massive overheating a few years later. So if it looks dust free and the fans are spinning you might want to get some thermal grease and reinstall the CPU cooler.

@jerv @johnpowell I watched at how the temperature goes up and down with Core Temp. I don’t know why but all the core goes to 3000ish MHz eventhough I just browsing with google and listen to music with winamp. And somehow it goes to 800is MHz which obviously makes the temperature down to 40–45 celsius.

And when I play video games and then I alt+tab, I see the temperature around 60 celsius but drop dramatically a few seconds later eventhough the game is still running in the background. Is it something to the software/OS?

I am curious what is spiking your CPU usage…..

@jerv I don’t know. It seems like whenever I open my games, the fan suddenly sounds louder and I assuming it is because it takes more load but whenever I go to desktop by alt+tab-ing, the load, temperature and noise becomes lower.

From the task manager, the CPU usage is around 25% and the physical memory is around 35%.

Does virtual memory has something to do with this? the system allocate it around 8GB and my RAM is 8GB also. Should I turn it off?

Turning Virtual memory off is a bad idea.

My system also unloads and cools off when I alt-tab out of a game. Under gaming conditions, I’m looking at ~120F on the CPU and 190F on the GPU; when not gaming, it’s more like 100F and 120F.

Purely anecdotal – on my laptop I generally run at around 160°F (~79°C; includes Chrome being opened), just going off memory I believe I usually idle at around 140°F (60°C). After 5 years I’ve had zero problems, so it doesn’t seem to be too problematic.

(If I had these same values with a desktop PC, however, I would be questioning things some.)

@zants I would still give it a decent cleaning to blow the crap out. My laptop under load barely hits what your’s idles at. Typically, it runs 95–140F, and at the high end of that range, it slows a little due to thermal throttling.

Assuming that isn’t the issue, start using it on hard surfaces instead of throwing it in your couch, or position it on your lap in a way that doesn’t block the vents.

Well, unless it’s a Pentium III laptop. There is no making them run cool :p

I’ve tried cleaning my computer and changing the thermal paste but nothing change.

Is there any chance my old harddisk which sometimes undetected causing this problem? Like it makes the CPU work harder?

This is how the CPU performance fluctuate drastically https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn2/1470392_10201067353021359_1240895104_n.jpg

That’s some heavy background tasking! Inefficient resource-hog virus scanner? Auto-defrag?

@jerv Other than the Windows, there is Avast Antivirus, Tuneup Utilities, Dropbox and Torrent that running on the background. From your saying, I suspect Tuneup Utilities since the auto maintenance is on but from the process in the taskbar, it doesn’t take so much resources more than Google Chrome when I surf internet.

You’re Torrenting? There is your issue! Torrenting is a constant drain, and occasionally a spiky one as it’s handling all sorts of requests and file transfers, both inbound and outbound, along with the accompanying read/write cycles on the hard drive.

Hmm you’re gonna try to shut it down for a while. To test it.

@jerv Nothing really changed. I’ve tried to just open core temp to watch the temperature and the video game (Arma III). It still overheat.