Faulty thermal readouts from Helios 300?

Hello!

My Helios 300's fans run very, very loud. I sort of excused that in the summer, but when I noticed that it was just as aggressive in the winters I opened up PredatorSense to tweak it around a bit... and noticed that my CPU was idling at 60C. In the middle of winter, with the ambient temperature being in the low tens. Under even mild loads it ramped up to 80C, with the fans blaring as if they were going to take off any moment. So far, even under heavy gaming, I've not seen it go to throttle city yet - but 80C for mild loads is worrying, so I took an air compressor and a brush and cleaned out the vents. I cleaned out a lot of dust, but my thermal performance barely improved.

So now I'm wondering if I just have faulty thermal diodes. I once turned the laptop to sleep, let it reach ambient temperature, turned it back on and immediately checked PredatorSense and Afterburner, and saw idle temps of around 50C. It's not proof of anything - the CPU could have had the time to heat up - but I'm not sure how it got from ~15C to 50C so fast. Is my hunch right, or should I just clean my laptop again/undervolt it/redo the thermal paste?

Accepted answers

Skelomorph

If you are not hitting 95C+, there is no need to redo the thermal paste. The Kaby Lake (7th gen aka 7xxx series) is known to have spiking temperatures, both laptop and desktop variants. It is only of the things folks have complained to Intel about. However, the CPUs are capable of running hot, so as long as they are not throttling or shutting down, they don't consider it a problem.

When the laptop first turns on, it is kinda normal for them to run 100% CPU and temperatures will easily spike 50C+, mine used to hit 70C+on startup.

BTW, are you doing loads based on CPU usage? If you have the i7, 50% is usually very close to maximum loads due to 4 threads being main core threads, and 4 threads being hyperthreads.

Skelo

All comments

Skelomorph

If you are not hitting 95C+, there is no need to redo the thermal paste. The Kaby Lake (7th gen aka 7xxx series) is known to have spiking temperatures, both laptop and desktop variants. It is only of the things folks have complained to Intel about. However, the CPUs are capable of running hot, so as long as they are not throttling or shutting down, they don't consider it a problem.

When the laptop first turns on, it is kinda normal for them to run 100% CPU and temperatures will easily spike 50C+, mine used to hit 70C+on startup.

BTW, are you doing loads based on CPU usage? If you have the i7, 50% is usually very close to maximum loads due to 4 threads being main core threads, and 4 threads being hyperthreads.

Skelo

shrik450

Okay cool (no pun intended!)

So should I mess around with the fan curves a bit to keep it quieter? Or will that make it easier for me to hurt my CPU in the long run? I'm asking this because it's getting annoying to just code without any music on and have the fan spike up and down like a rollercoaster.

Skelomorph

shrik450 said:

Okay cool (no pun intended!)

So should I mess around with the fan curves a bit to keep it quieter? Or will that make it easier for me to hurt my CPU in the long run? I'm asking this because it's getting annoying to just code without any music on and have the fan spike up and down like a rollercoaster.

I would recommend looking into undervolting to lower the temperatures, which will help the fan noise as well. As for temperatures, 80C wont hurt the CPU. To stop the CPU from revving up and down so much, leave it on auto without CoolBoost on.

Skelo

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