What physical thing is my ACPI?

I got my CPU down to 38°C idle (it had the overheating problem before replacing thermal paste).
In Speedfan there's a a temp called "temp1" and it's the ACPI temperature, but what is it? Is it the chip that's between the radiator and the cpu that has a cooling pad?


Also Acer Aspire 5520G

 

ACPI isn't a physical thing. It doesn't exist in classic meaning of the word exist. It's a piece of software that interacts with various sensors and states of hardware devices within the system on one side and OS on other side. The ACPI temperature on your system is probably temperature of the north bridge, but I'm not 100% certain. Just treat it as temperature of air inside the laptop.

 

Advanced Configuration and Power Interface A power management specification that makes hardware status and control actions available to the operating system. Controls start stop and status of perpherals.

ACPI will report if asked nicely about any peripheral it controls or has status information for. un fortunately it may not be all that clear what it is reporting. so Speedfan, HWmontior etc end up saying " hey here is a temperature ACPI reported . . but no idea what it is.

first question: does the temperature vary at all from cold, or diverge when cold fromthe ambient temperature. If it starts at 90c and/or never moves not it is false data.

Mystery readings from ACPI can turn out to duplicate CPU or chipset readings (usually also correctly identified and reported elsewhere).

Wild card readings with odd values? , Ambient one day, rising to 50c the next then falling. Best guess is it is the BATTERY internal temp, which is reported to the charging circuit and then to ACPI.

 

Well the thing is, it lowered from 70°C to 60 when I fixed the CPU heating problem, although now it still is warmer than my cpu at all times. When I load up Speedfan it says 53°C and it's almost always a straight line in the chart area. It does stay very constant, it doesn't change at all...

 

But I guess there's nothing I can do about it to lower the temperature?

Sorry doublepost

 

That's not true. All software is a physical thing; it's definitely not supernatural.

 

Hammertime, please post your system specs in this thread for better assistance from forum members, or toss them in your signature.

 

It's a concept. You can't touch it, you can't determine its location, acceleration, you can't directly measure its mass. It's as physical as communism. The electrons that are used to make software aren't software the moment they stop being the excess of electricity that makes the charge within memory.

I also fail to see how discussing philosophical definition of existence is going to help Hammertime solve his problem.

 

That isn't the definition of existence, though. The fact is that software is present in the physical world as a specific configuration of 1s and 0s, which are physically different configurations of storage elements on whatever medium you happen to have the software on. Communism is also physical, because it exists as a configuration of synapses in your brain.

It won't, but it's fun.

 

We're not here to have fun or to yap about wether software is a physical thing. The fact that I have an ACPI and that it's 53°C means that it exists in this world... Now can you take your metaphysical bathroom science somewhere else? Thank you...

Also specs:
Acer Aspire 5520G

4gb RAM
AMD Turion TL-60 2Ghz
W7 Ultimate
Nvidia GeForce 8600M GS

Could it be the temperature of the 2nd chip that is linked with the heat conductor? (the one that goes from CPU to radiator)

 

If the temperature remains constant, it's unlikely to come from a real temperature sensor. It sounds anomalous to me.

 

Bloooming eck

Remember most devices do not report temperature directly, Disk drives for example report degrees below critical temperature so a conversion is needed to tell the temp.

If the monitor doesn't know the source it doesnt know the right conversion either.
If you have good readings on the CPU, Graphics , HDD, Motherboard/chipset whatever it is reporting is unlikely to be a problem. It could be reporting fan speed or something as a temperature

Loonies like me use thermal imaging and infra red thermometers on gaming systems to assure that nothing monitored unmonitored is in distress (ok in unintended distress). For a laptop I would suggest you make sure you do know your CPU, graphics and system temps are ok . . and that the cooling air exhaust is at a reasonable temperture and doesn't smell of burnt plastic. Then forget it. Even if the temp is true plenty of components today normally run at 60c and CPU's and GPUs are designed to perform at 90c.

I will leave the philosophy of existentialism for others

 

I have my HDD, GPU & CPU temps. I'll just leave it then...

 

@Hammertime
As I said in my first response, I think it probably is, but I'm not 100% sure.

 

Okay thank you for that. Is there a way to recognize a temperature sensor on the MOBO?

 

If there is, I don't know it. Sorry. It could be that "ACPI" is the sensor on the motherboard, but until someone manages to exactly find out the model of the "ACPI" sensor and identify its location we won't know for sure. I do know that my "ACPI" sometimes increases temperature reading when I insert my external "express card" sound card which produces large amounts of heat.

 

ACPI = Advanced Configuration and Power Interface
It's the means by which your operating system controls things such as standby, hibernate, device power status, and CPU performance state. It's not a physical object by any means.

Say, here's an idea. Download HWMonitor from CPUID.com (same folks as CPU-Z) and post a screenshot here. Might help us all decipher what your temp sensor is.
For example, ACPI is a subsection of my HWMonitor window, with four thermal zones present (TZ00, TZ01, TZVR, and TZVL). Still have no idea what the heck they are, though.

 

http://www.roflsaurus.com/users/Hammertime/HWmonitor.gif

THRM= Thermal?

 

THRM is a thermal zone.
Typically found on NForce Mainboard.
If I am not wrong your board should be NForce based.
Different boards use different variable to control thermalzone.

 

What is my Nforce Mainboard? Do you mean motherboard and what do you mean variable to control thermalzone?

 

Your motherboard uses nVidia's nForce chipset.

I think he was talking about the way most temperature sensors work. They have a set temperature and they detect how outside temperature is different from it. For example it says my temperature is T0 - 30 degrees. So at some point the exact temperature is calculated. If the sensor is incorrectly detected, wrong value for the temperature constant could be used resulting in wrong reported temperature.

 

What I meant is that for Nvidia Chipsets, Nvidia Defined the base DSDT format.
In every computer that is ACPI Compliant they have a Code Table Called DSDT.
Inside the DSDT they defined Thermal Zone to determine throttling behaviour when it gets too hot.
In Intel Chipset the DSDT defined the Thermal Zone as "TZ1" "TZ0" etc.
I notice in Nvidia Motherboard the DSDT is usually defined as "THRM"
It is just different naming of the thermal zone according to how the manufacturer writes the DSDT Table no need to get too overly concern over it.
As for the question if the thermal zone actually exist physically exist, I am not sure.
It can either be a motherboard sensor or simply some value derived from the calculation of the CPU and GPU temperature sensors.

 

Ok guys this is really weird. I was playing HL2 (on my lap) and I heard the typical CPU overheating sound again (a very high pitched sound, not very loud, it sounds electronical) and when I checked speedfan again, I see that my ACPI temp is 80°C, although now my CPU is back to 41°C , the ACPI temp stays at 80. Any ideas? I think the overheating was because it was on my lap, but maybe you know have another idea at what my ACPI might indicate...

And now it has dropped to 52°C. The thing is that it's really in steps, not gradually. The graph looks like this


80°C______
__________|
__________|
52°C ______|________________

 

Like I said before, that number just doesn't seem to represent anything meaningful.

 

FFS

If the temperature doesnt start at room temp ignore it
If the temperature exceeds that of the CPU and GPU ignore it
If the temperature doesnt vary degree by degree ignore it
If it moves in big steps it is likely a fan speed not a temperature
In short if you dont know what it is and you already have CPU and GPU data IGNORE IT

 

BruBoo, don't get frustrated.
Hammertime, given the information you've provided us, I'd say to either ignore the "sensor" or contact Acer directly for information (good luck).

 

Okay I think I got it. Everest says it's my MCP temperature, or northbridge temp.

 

Looks like I made a correct guess at the beginning!