CPU causing laptop to freeze up despite not hitting critical temperature

I'm on a laptop with an AMD turion x2. A while ago my laptop started to overheat, pushing my CPU to 95C (its critical temp) while gaming and therefore causing the thing to freeze, but this was solved by dusting with some canned air. Now, when gaming my laptop, despite never breaching around 81C, will freeze up like its reached critical temperature. Can anybody give me any help in this matter? I'm monitoring the temperature using speedfan.

 

Does it happen with every game you play or with one only?

I don't think that you CPU is the issue here.
1- You check if the is a patch for your game.
2- Upate you video drivers
3- Run memtest just in case (could me that one of your ram module is faulty)

 

1. Its not just one game
2. Video Drivers are updated
3. what is memtest?

 

memtest checks to see if anything is wrong with your ram.

http://www.memtest.org/

edit: i use UBCD and MRI for PC diagnostics

 

a) ignore the meters that say 'critical temperature'.
b) pay attention to the real-world behavior of your machine.
c) run some kind of long term (hours long, overnight??) non-windows test of your machine that will stress the cpu and memory.

 

the machine seems to be running fine. again, this is a new problem; I never had trouble gaming before.

EDIT: There is no meter that says critical temperature either. 95C is the manufacture's critical temp and was also observed by me first hand.

 

things happen. If it happens again run a few tests and consider trying to clean out the air vents and fans (minor disassembly required) and in an extreme case, removing, cleaning, and reinstalling the cpu and gpu heat sink with quality heat sink goop.

Advice for doing the cleaning is easily found via search.

 

Although 95c is very high it won't damage your CPU. For a modern CPU the temperature limit is around 120c to 125c.

Your CPU work as follow:
1- If the temperature reaches 95c, your CPU will slow itself down which will allow its temperature to drop a little bit. When it is a little coller (i.e. <95c) it increases it speeds again, and so on.
2- If for some reason the temperature cary on increasing (for example a faulty fan) the CPU and hence your laptop will turn itself off as soon as the temperaure reaches around 120c (I'm not sure about AMD CPUs, for intel its 125c). It does this to preserve itself from burning.

In your first post you said that you've undusted your laptop. This is good. There are two other things that can do to drop your max CPU temperature to region of 70c or below:
1- If your laptop is out of warranty you should replace your CPU thermal compound with some thing better such as Arctic Silver 5 or something similar.
2- Also you should undervolt your CPU. You can use RMclock (a tutorial here). If RMclock doesn't work with your CPU then you can use K10Stat (another undervolting software).

Back to your game problem. Does your game freeze for like few seconds then unfreeze itself? Do you have to restart your computer to unfreeze it? Has it been freezing since day one?

It will help if you can provide the name of the game, and the specs of your laptop (CPU, Ram, GPU, and OS)

 

RMClock didn't work to well with this comp, i will try k10stat. Is there a tutorial for that?

Also, the freezing is literally the whole computer. The only thing I can do is hold down the power button to hard shut down. Otherwise it will just stay frozen, fan running on high etc.

The HP laptop I'm using is an AMD Turion x2 processor, 4gb RAM, Radeon 4650 HD mobility (i think, its not with me right now), and Windows 7. According to AMD the critical temperature for this processor is 95C

This freezing problem started around January. Before that, nothing would happen. I could literally play for hours with no problem.

Before I undusted it, I used the power management to limit cpu power to 99%, which prevented the freezing. After dusting though this wasn't necessary, and once again I could play for hours on 100% cpu power w/o it freezing up.

Then one week later, the freezing started, at a much lower temp, around the mid 80C mark.

 

You can find a tutorial for K10Stat here,

http://aspiregemstone.blogspot.com/2009/06/k10stat-amd-griffin-processor.html

 

Well, undervolting didn't help, assuming I did it right. It was pretty straightforward with k10stat.

 

Did you try cleaning your laptop's air vents and fan?

 

might sound stupid, but is your game 100% compatible with Win7?

As I said I'm quite sure that the freezing is not CPU related. I think it's software related... I don't know some kind of conflict between the different applications in your system. It cound be game/win7, game/antivirus, game/vga driver and so on.

 

Its not just one game. Mass Effect 2, Bad Company 2, etc. Whether the game is GPU or CPU heavy it doesn't make a difference.

And this hasn't always been a problem. Like I said, it started out of nowhere in january, which was fixed by dusting. Then it started again, but when I dust there is nothing there :\

 

how do you 'dust'? Do you clean and wipe or blow canned air into the machine?

 

the latter

 

you blow compressed air..... also try get notebook cooling pad... and apply thermal paste to your CPU and GPU and don't be suprised with the temps... notebooks with AMD processors are known to overheat.

 

canned air should be banned.

all it does is to drive the dirt deeper into the machine.

 

I agree.

Well not any more. Besides they undervolt better then intel.

To the OP have you run a memory test as I suggested. You can use Orthos or Memtest under Windows. I would recommand though that you use Memtest under DOS. If you're like me and cannot be bothered to create a DOS boot CD/USB Stick you should try Linux Ubuntu Live CD since it is shipped with Memtest. All you have to do is boot from the CD and select Memtest from the menu.

Please run the test since this would ensure that you don't have a faulty ram. You should also scan your HDD. A harddrive with bad or corrupted sector will make a system instable. You game might be freezing while trying to access data stored on a bad/correcpted sector. The best way to do that is to download the scan utility from the website of your HDD's manufactorer.

Last please check your garphics carte temperatures as it might be overheating. You can use GPU-Z or HWmonitor.