E4300 Heating Problem at 80c

hi, I have a Dell E4300 P9400 @ 2.4Ghz. At times when doing light work my temperature reaches between 70-80c. Is this normal? Should I rma the laptop or order some AS5 paste? My idle temp is over 50+. The funny thing is that I experienced no lagg or slow down. I am using speedfan for temp reading.

 

I would hazard to guess the first culprit of those temps - and yes they do seem a bit high considering - would be that airflow is being restricted inside the laptop, like the heatsink fins are being blocked by dirt/dust/grime/gunk/lint/etc. It's the most common problem that causes overheating or significantly higher temps on laptops. If you've had that E4300 for some time, that's what I'd suspect first and foremost above anything else.

You might not be able to visibly see such a blockage but, 50C+ for idle temps on that laptop is a bit excessive; my E4300 idles at 39-42C depending on room temp, with a full/max load temp of 66C but I cleaned it out recently and there had been a "layer" of that gunk on the fins blocking airflow as I just mentioned. Was pretty thick to and was just trapping all that heat inside the machine. As soon as I cleaned it all out it's working fantastic now and barely gets warm at all in most daily use.

Only time I see spikes is during video encoding with HandBrake or mp3 file creation with LAME but that's to be expected because of the increased CPU usage.

 

That temperature is very high for light usage but my E4300 has reached those temperatures after running for several hours under full CPU load.

You can check the cooling system by removing the keyboard (instructions here).

Also, I suggest you use HWmonitor to check the temperatures.

John

 

Putting in some Arctic Silver 5 won't hurt, and it will give you an opportunity to completely clean out the cooling system. However, accessing the CPU in the E4300 is not easy. It requires palmrest and system board removal, which is even worse because of the large number of ribbon cables that the E4300 uses.

After I put Arctic Silver 5 in a E4300 with the SP9600, idle temperatures were around 115F or so. The system didn't have heat issues before though, I just wanted to get rid of the OEM grease. Temperatures were actually lower before I applied the grease, but the fan doesn't spin up as often with the Arctic Silver 5, which was quite nice.