The system was shut down due to a critical thermal event

This is concerning. Last night I started playing a game on my brand new 9560 and about 10 minutes in the system just shutdown automatically (not BSOD, just an orderly Windows shutdown).

I immediately felt the underside of the laptop and it was not even warm to the touch. I did hear the fan kick in on low speed while playing.

Event log shows this:

The system was shut down due to a critical thermal event.
Shutdown Time = ‎2018‎-‎02‎-‎02T05:13:14.776450500Z
ACPI Thermal Zone = Intel(R) Dynamic Platform Thermal Framework
_CRT = 373K

I started up the same game again this morning and played for about an hour with no repeat of the shutdown. Again the fan kicked in on low and the laptop ran warm but not hot to the touch.

Then I got more scientific about this and download HWiNFO and Passmark BurnIn Test.

BurnIn ran for about 15 minutes and neither the CPU nor the GPU got above high-60s. This time though the laptop felt *HOT* (especially the area around the hinge underneath the camera) and the fans were spinning at max revs.

The test completed successfully with no shutdown.

Should I put the first failure down to an anomaly in the Intel Thermal Framework or should I be investigating this further?

 

Trust your senses - if it feels cold its almost always going to be cool on the chip (unless your heatsink isn't connected). Its probably just a bug, but if you want to be sure you can do some more tests for a longer time. The fact that it felt hot during your burn test is a good thing, as the heat is being dissipated rather than retained, so I doubt its any hardware problem.

If it happens again then you should try reinstalling some drivers, as that is almost certainly the issue.

 

The voltage regulators mosfets (VRM) get hot. And they don't get cooled by the fans, no airflow over them. But this usually causes Power Limit throttling by DPTF, not shutdown. I guess DPTF monitors several sensors, unfortunately their thresholds for throttling / shutdown are undocumented.