920xm overclocking overheating?

Hey folks, me again.

920xm
throttlestop settings:
27 / 26 / 25 / 23

TDP 90
TDC 78

prime95 temps after 1 minute: 92-94c I find this WAY TOO HOT. This has to be unsual, right? I just repasted ic Diamond 7 right before this post.


Help?

 

Just did the test myself, unplugging my KOI cooling mod and I reached 90 degrees after about 30 seconds on those exact same settings.
I don't think those temps are necessarily a problem because prime95 is an unrealistic load and you'll never reach 90 degrees during gaming.
I believe these older 45nm CPUs are also a bit more resilient that modern 32nm or 20nm CPUs in terms of prolonged heat endurance also.

Try a gaming test and see what your max cpu temps are after 30 minutes of gaming?

 

Hear hear!!

Indeed I have run the CPU for prolonged periods video encoding at 100% load at 25x back in the day with a sustained but stable max temp of 96c. This was on stock cooling before any mods. The chip is still going strong and I have put extra volts onto it since!!

Pretty hard to kill one of these chips!

 

I don't have any cpu heavy games at the moment but with heroes of the storm on high everything, I hit 73-77C. It got me worried because yesterday.. or was it the day before, my temperatures spiked up to 88C+ when I was playing. I only ever noticed it AFTER playing though. that's on an ambient temp of maybe 27C. Possibly a bit higher.

EDIT-

OOPS so wait koi, are you saying I'm 100% okay to leave it as is?

 

Try running 25/23/23/23 at the same TDP/TDC but essentially those temps are fine.
Do you have a laptop cooling pad? Or some way to get more airflow on underside of the laptop?

 

http://i.imgur.com/Wnv3kNI.png

Intel CPUs automatically start to thermal throttle and slow down when the CPU has reached its "maximum safe operating temperature". For the 920XM, thermal throttling starts when any core hits 100°C.

Is 80°C a big number? Yes and so is 90°C but as long as your CPU is not thermal throttling, it is operating in a safe temperature zone. If Intel thought these temperatures were going to hurt the CPU then it would take them about 2 seconds to lower the thermal throttling temperature to prevent this from ever happening. Some of their CPUs like my 3rd Gen desktop Core i5-3570K has a thermal throttling temperature of 105°C.

I am going to trust Intel on this one. It would make no sense for them to design something that they knew was going to deliberately fail. Intel has built some incredible thermal management technology into all of their CPUs. They deliberately mount individual core temperature sensors on the hottest spots on the core to insure that if any part of the CPU ever gets too hot, it will throttle just enough to protect the CPU from any long term damage.

Just for the record, Intel usually sets the THERMTRIP signal to go active at approximately 25°C beyond the thermal throttling temperature. In case there is ever a serious problem like your heatsink became loose and thermal throttling was not enough to control the CPU, this back up system shuts the CPU down usually between 125°C and 130°C. No worries. Enjoy your 920XM like King of Interns has been doing year after year.

 

I run 29/29/28/28 at all times these days. While gaming my CPU can peak up to 93c. So what

You could run the 920xm at 99c all day and it would be fine. What is wonderful is that you can run intensive rendering or encoding tasks at 95c+ and your work will not be corrupted the CPU just keeps chugging along. The hard part is to tweak/ improve your cooling enough to keep temps from hitting 100c on any core lest performance will suffer.

45nm intel nehelem is a very tough cookie indeed.

27c ambient is fairly high. With stock cooling your temps look pretty normal don't worry. You ought to try to improve your cooling some though I can tell you ways if you are interested so that you can run it minimum 24x/25/26/27across the board. If you are lucky your CPU might even go further than this.

 

What I have for now are those things that look like cones to lift my laptop from the table about an inch high. That's it.
I saw your cooling mod, I'm looking to at least open up the underside of the machine and add grills right on top of the heatsinks for better airflow. The only concern is that I take this baby out a lot. Like, outdoors kind of thing. Considering that, I'm not sure it's a good idea to open up the underside and add grills.

 

It depends how professional you make it. I just hacked it open. Delicate isn't my forte haha

Someone else on here cut it very neatly open and mounted the wire mesh on the inside flush against the holes he has made. Looked very nice and should not wreck portability. Or use of it outside so long as you don't rest it in the dirt too much lol

 

I'm so sick of my crappy 92mm cooler master usb fans that rattle and whine, I'm considering buying a cheap and crappy 300W PSU off ebay and using it to power x2 noctua NF-F12 quiet-optimised fans and using the PSU to prop up the back of the laptop. Watch this space.

Also King do you think taller RAM heatsinks, and not the ultra low-profile ones I'm currently using, will make much of a difference if using 120mm static pressure fans?

 

I see a difference using taller heatsinks however they cost me a bomb! I would love to get more but 1 pack of 8 little heatsinks costs me 1,000 yen. I would need another 5 packs to properly cover the GPU alone lol. I could probably sneak a few more in around the cpu too!

Essentially having all those heatsinks gives me ALOT more time before the heat hits throttle temp. For most usages including gaming it allows me to get away with stupid high clockspeeds and voltages and stay well under 100C. Intensive tasks at 100% it is only a matter of time before temps eventually reach 100C as far as I can see. I intend to tweak it once the new cpu arrives and test further.

I also used a different technique to place them. I found that by laying some flat and some on their sides back to back with the thermal glue sticking them to the side of the laid flat heatsinks I could build layer upon layer of heatsinks. I managed to squeeze about 30% more heatsinks in the same surface area using this technique while the airflow could still reach everything. When I operate next time I shall take some photos.

edit; just ran prime 95 quick run with cooling on max. Reached 100C after about 1 minute lol. Luckily nothing really stresses the cpu as hard as Prime 95! Video encoding I can pretty much keep it stable around 97-98C in winter. Summer forget it. This at 3.73ghz. Fingers crossed I can run similar thermals but at 4.13ghz soon no harm in hoping hehe. If I can pull that off the humble 920xm will end up humbling the entire mobile sandy bridge line except for the XM's and keep up with the fastest ivy bridge chips stock for stock! Not bad.