Conroe Temperature Threshold

[careless223]

I have a question here about the Temperature Threshold of the Conroe line of Intel Core 2 chips. I have read various places that the chips threshold before damage is done is ~56 C. Other places I have read that as high as 80 C is acceptable. So what do you think the threshold is before any damage is done?

In case you were wondering I was overclocking a little and now my proc (core 2 duo) idles at ~60 C. Is that an appropriate temperature or am I risking frying my CPU?

Now I realize that overclocking with a stock cooler is bad practice but that is all I have now. Christmas is tomorrow so I asked for a Zalman 9500. It should cut the heat by ~18 C. I can push the chip further as I have already done.It can go 1.5 gigahertz over the stock clock fine without any stability problems but it is just that damn heat that will eventually be the end of it. :|

[cooper]

When the package temp goes into the 75 C range, you're generally in trouble. 56 sounds disgustingly low, and I'm sure I've had systems run hotter than that.

AMD used to be more tolerant in this regard aswell.

But here's the kicker: Thermal throttling.

It was on the P4 and I'm sure they kept it around. Basically the CPU clocks down when it feels it gets too hot, to prevent damage, and will shut down when even that doesn't result in sufficient cooling.

The system is notified of thermal throttling, so look for programs that can see this happening.

[moonlit]

Unfortunately it's shareware but look out for CPUIdle Extreme, it's a software cooling app, providing the CPU's not perminantly at high load it does very well, generally knocking ~10'C off my AMD AthlonXP 2100+ during general Windows stuff keeping it just a little higher than the boot temperature. It also helps cool the CPU a lot quicker after you finish doing something that uses the CPU heavily.

It works by sending some kind of instruction to the CPU to do nothing during it's unused cycles, works on most (if not all) x86 CPUs. Not sure about 64-bit but it's worth looking it up.

I've used it a lot on my systems, I've used SpeedFan to watch the temps, you see a big drop on the temp graphs while it's running. When you finish something that taxes the CPU you can watch the temp graphs plummet. Totally worth getting.

[careless223]

Thanks guys.

Right now I have overclocked it 1 gigahertz with no stability loss. That is up from the stock 2.13. I love core 2.

I have the Asus software running on my third moniter constantly which shows everything from the fan speeds to the mobo temp to the core clock. When I play F.E.A.R. or encode Divx the temperature generally climbs to about 62-63 which as Cooper said is well within acceptable boundaries. Mind you that it was running at 35 under full load when it was out of the box.

Thanks for the help guys. I appreciate it.