How hot is too hot? Slow is too slow?

[petrw1]

My daughters PC is running VERY SLOWLY lately. Even opening the Control Panel takes a minute but once I am in it the performance is acceptable.
It is a AMD Duron PIII 1.3 GHz.

I tried a few things (I am only a rank amateur in these things).

1. Virus scan is clean (so says AVG) ... GOOD

2. Spam scan found 201 critical modules including 6 at rank 10 (so says Ad-Aware from Lavasoft) ... BAD however trying to delete them causes Ad-Aware to crash ... very BAD. I will get a friends boot CD with resident Spyware and Virus cleaners for that. Until then I won't know how much this impacts the PC.

3. I also pursued the core temperature angle. I fould some free software called MBM (MotherBoard Monitor). It gives me a temperature reading of 70 - 73 degrees Celcius (158 - 163 F). Is that TOO HOT or NORMAL? It appeared that as the temperature rose Prime95 slowed down. I was running a TF of 67 Bits of M50533961. As the temperature rose the time to complete 1% which worked out to almost 15,000 iterations rose from 15 minutes to 18 minutes. Am I anywhere near the expected speed?

Can anyone respond to point 3 above.

Thanks

[mdettweiler]

Originally Posted by petrw1

3. I also pursued the core temperature angle. I fould some free software called MBM (MotherBoard Monitor). It gives me a temperature reading of 70 - 73 degrees Celcius (158 - 163 F). Is that TOO HOT or NORMAL? It appeared that as the temperature rose Prime95 slowed down. I was running a TF of 67 Bits of M50533961. As the temperature rose the time to complete 1% which worked out to almost 15,000 iterations rose from 15 minutes to 18 minutes. Am I anywhere near the expected speed?

Can anyone respond to point 3 above.

Thanks

Whether or not that is "too hot" depends on the CPU. First of all, what CPU do you have? If it's an Intel, you can probably look up the "Thermal Spec" rating online; AMD probably has a similar thing on their website. The "Thermal Spec" is the temperature at which the computer begins automatically slowing down the CPU in an attempt to stave off overhigh temperatures (so that, hopefully, it will keep the temperature from reaching the "critical" thermal rating, at which point the computer will immediately power off to prevent damage to the CPU). Your specific temperature readings of 70-73 degrees are somewhat of a tossup--whether or not they are enough to trigger slowdowns depends on the thermal spec of your specific CPU model. (From what I've seen so far, thermal spec ratings tend to be around ~70-75 degrees Celsius.)

However, I can't imagine that thermal slowdowns alone could cause *all* the slowdowns you're describing. Probably the spyware/adware/etc. that turned up in your scans is the primary cause of the Control Panel slowdown and other such things--though the Prime95 slowdown is quite believably a result of thermal spec stuff as described above.

Hope this helps!

[petrw1]

Originally Posted by mdettweiler

Whether or not that is "too hot" depends on the CPU. First of all, what CPU do you have? If it's an Intel, you can probably look up the "Thermal Spec" rating online; AMD probably has a similar thing on their website. The "Thermal Spec" is the temperature at which the computer begins automatically slowing down the CPU in an attempt to stave off overhigh temperatures

AMD Duron PIII 1.300 Ghz.

Thanks ... I checked www.amd.com and found a paper called:

Thermal and Electrical Specifications of 7th Generation AMD Processors

from 1994. My particular PC is listed in the chart as having a max "Die Temperature" of 90 C. If that is what MBM is measuring then I have 15 degrees to spare.

[jrk]

Durons are newer than 1994, so I would look for a more recent publication.

[petrw1]

Originally Posted by jrk

Durons are newer than 1994, so I would look for a more recent publication.

Interesting because I think my PC is listed there. In fact the paper has PCs right up to over 2Ghz which I too thought were newer than 1994.

Also every single PC listed there has a Die Temperature of 85 to 95 C.

I am assuming "Die" is a noun and a synonym for core or chip and NOT a very meaning literally it will die at that temp.

And I found this is a 1992 report:

http://www.vanshardware.com/reviews/...3_Duron_13.htm

Technical Specifications

The Duron 1300 is based on the Morgan core rather than the older Spitfire core that powered the chip from 600 MHz to 1 GHz. Morgan adds the same hardware data prefetch, increased Translation Look-Aside Buffers, and SSE support to the Duron that the Athlon XP gained from the Palomino core. Other technical specifications include:

Cache Size
192K

Nominal Voltage
1.75v (up from 1.65 in Spitfire)

Transistor Count
22.5 million

Max Die Temp
90° Celsius

Max Thermal Power
60W

Typical Thermal Power
55.2W

[mdettweiler]

Originally Posted by petrw1

Interesting because I think my PC is listed there. In fact the paper has PCs right up to over 2Ghz which I too thought were newer than 1994.

Also every single PC listed there has a Die Temperature of 85 to 95 C.

I am assuming "Die" is a noun and a synonym for core or chip and NOT a very meaning literally it will die at that temp.

And I found this is a 1992 report:

http://www.vanshardware.com/reviews/...3_Duron_13.htm

Technical Specifications

The Duron 1300 is based on the Morgan core rather than the older Spitfire core that powered the chip from 600 MHz to 1 GHz. Morgan adds the same hardware data prefetch, increased Translation Look-Aside Buffers, and SSE support to the Duron that the Athlon XP gained from the Palomino core. Other technical specifications include:

Cache Size
192K

Nominal Voltage
1.75v (up from 1.65 in Spitfire)

Transistor Count
22.5 million

Max Die Temp
90° Celsius

Max Thermal Power
60W

Typical Thermal Power
55.2W

Hmm...I don't think the "die temperature" is the same thing as "thermal spec", though it would seem likely that it is the same as the "critical" temperature I described in my earlier post. However, as you speculated, I doubt that the "die" part means that your CPU will die at that temperature; probably instead it has something to do with the manufacturing definition of "die".

Of course, your temperatures are nowhere near the 90 degree "die temperature", so you shouldn't need to worry about that. The "thermal spec" rating is the only thing that would make a difference in this case.

Just curious, how old is your CPU? It's quite possible that if it's somewhat old, AMD may not have even bothered to post the thermal spec information on their website.

[petrw1]

Originally Posted by mdettweiler

Just curious, how old is your CPU? It's quite possible that if it's somewhat old, AMD may not have even bothered to post the thermal spec information on their website.

Not sure, she got it used. I'll have to look for a model number

[Kevin]

http://www.cpuscorecard.com/cpuprices/ad.htm

Matches what was already posted, but with realistic dates.

[starrynte]

i'm throttling prime95 at 80% partly due to high-ish temperatures
anyways, the questions:
at 80%, prime95 runs with the cpu between 57 and 60 degrees celsius. is this normal for a pentium 4 prescott (3.00 GHz, but i'm overclocking to about 3.5 GHz)
though its 60 degrees, the cpu fan is still only spinning at 2460 RPM according to speedfan, is this true? and if it is, why isn't it spinning any faster? is it because i'm overclocking and the power supply unit needs to give more power to the cpu and therefore less to the fan? (it used to spin at at least 3000 RPM when the cpu warmed up to over 58 degrees)
last: any general suggestions to cool the case?

[retina]

Just by way of comparison my Acer laptop runs at 90°C just before automatic thermal shutdown. And during idle mode it runs at 72°C. Yes, I know, the Acer is just plain awful at cooling but it seems not to be suffering any ill effects after running at >=72°C for the last ~2 years.

[starrynte]

question: what is the "1.5V", "3V", "5V" that appears in the voltages section of speedfan ? (it can be adjusted, but i don't know what it is/what it does)