How many heatcycles?

I have a question for you guy's .
As probably most of you know, heatcycles are bad for the hardware inside a computer especially for the GPU. My question now is, how many heatcycles are bad?

I have a Nvidia 9600M GT in my notebook which I use for school. Classes take 1.5 hour, after that I have to switch room's to participate in another class (sometimes 6 times a day ). In the time between switching room's, the laptop is hibernated (meaning the hardware cools down). In the new room I restart my notebook (so it heats op again. A heatcyle you see ).

When it gets worse, this cycle continues about 8-10 times a day (so heating up, hibernate and cooldown, restart and reheat, ect). How fast will this shorten the lifetime of my notebook? So, what is roughly the maximum amount of heatcycles a GPU can take? And what can I do about it? (letting it on isn't an option as the harddrive continues to spin and could take damage because of the shaking.)

I know most of the people aren't worrying about this, but I'm quite paranoid

 

I don't know if that's enough cycling to matter, but the hard drive shaking would be solved with an SSD.

 

I use my notebook quite often like that, and look what happened to mine. Maybe you should be paranoid. Just joking.

My guess is that if it isn't overheating, the system will outlive it's usefulness at this rate. If you brought overheating into the scenario, or a faulty G84M core, then it could be a little different. Don't take my word for this though, I'm posting what I am guessing, I don't actually know this for sure.

And hard drives can take a bit of a beating before they will break, I've seen people drop notebooks all the time, and they are fine, not from great heights of course. Carrying it around shouldn't really damage it. And if you have a hard drive safety utility like some later model Toshiba notebooks do, then the risk is even less.

 

I got major deja vu when I read this. I swear I've seen this before.

To actually answer the question, your usages are perfectly normal. You should have no issues. After all, you're only cycling to non-game clocks. If you were going from, say, off to full-on gaming temperatures and back again constantly then I'd start to monitor things carefully.

 

Really? Do we really know that? What makes you so sure?

I think the idea is complete nonsense unless we are talking about those faulty Nvidia GPU's. It might play some role in the life of hard drives, but the chances of this leading to failure within its useful life is pretty slim, considering past precedence.

There is really nothing that changes in the computer after a heat cycle, so nothing is going to happen regardless of how many times you warm it up and cool it down.

 

Well as far as I know heatcycles are bad because the solder used in GPU's gets worse and worse every cycle. Same what is happening to the Xbox 360 (RRoD), only on the Xbox 360 it is FAR more worse (Microsoft used a realy realy bad/cheap solder for the GPU).

I sometimes do game on the notebook, but not after it has just turned on. When I start a game, the notebook has already be on for quite some time (so it had time to heat up ).

Thank you all for replying. I'm trying to be less paranoid now and use the notebook as I want .

 

But that is two specific cases out of thousands since the dawn of GPU's and personal computers in general that have had zero trouble regardless of heat cycles. If it was faulty on manufacture, problems will show up, but if not, nothing will ever happen. Solder doesn't go bad or get worse and worse. It just doesn't unless something is wrong with it to begin with, like it being very weak or made of the wrong material for the application.

 

The 9600 isn't one of Nvidia's cursed GPUs as far as I know, so you shouldn't have problems. Unless some latent defect for the 9 Series hasn't reared its ugly head/Nvidia has buried it.

You have normal operation. I can't predict the future, but I doubt you have anything to worry about

 

you really should't have any problems with 9600M GT... and ur usage is quite similar to mine... there should be no problems... so far my 9600M GT lasted 15 months....

 

If you're going to play armchair electrical engineer, know your facts.

Heat cycles damages electronic components and material goods (You know why roads have pot holes that needs to be filled? Yep, heat cycles). Fact. Know it, love it, use it. Don't BS, or you're just making yourself look like a armchair tool.

 

I know what heat cycling is and how it affects many things both good and bad. Can you show me one example where a computer component was heat cycled to death other than the few cases where solder joints were improperly made? I doubt it because measures have been taken since day one to nearly eliminate that possibility. I also know that computers are designed with heat cycling in mind and are in general immune to the temperature changes under normal use. Doesn't it mean something if a chip is tested for a thousand cycles or more to temperatures greater or lower than it is likely to see and it shows no signs of fatigue? The use of proper solder for the application and strong solder joints makes the possibility of slowly weakening and eventually breaking those joints next to zero due to cycles of heating and cooling. Very often the solder joint is stronger than the parts being connected.

Also I'm not so sure heat cycling is solely to blame for the high profile failures of Nvidia GPU's. There is also stress on the solder joints due to flexing, no matter how small that may be, that may have played a role coupled with the heat cycling of the improper solder joints.

And no, heat cycles don't cause potholes. Potholes are formed by people driving on the roads and freezing water.