How hot should a CF-19 MK5 i5 2520m get?

Hi all, I purchased a CF-19 MK5 off eBay and while I was migrating data from my old laptop to it, I noticed it was rather hot. Installed hwmonitor and was getting readings of 165 degrees F from the cpu all the way up to 200F. It is just sitting there on balanced power mode. I am thinking there is no way this unit should get that hot since the max operating temp of the cpu is 210 celsius, I believe. Seller is claiming that all his units run that hot and it's just installing updates at the beginning, after which it should be idling at a "mere" 165 degrees. Any ideas?

 

This is something I noticed when I upgraded to the MK5 from the MK2/3 . It must be the faster cpu. Everything else works fine on it.

 

No kidding, they literally run this hot and this close to the thermal limits of the CPU???

I am in the Pacific NW and my room is never over 70 degrees. Not like I'm in the Sahara.

 

I never really checked how hot mine runs but it is very warm. I will get mine out later on and check how hot it gets.

 

That would be extremely appreciated as while I have the option to return the unit, I'd rather not if this is normal, as it's in excellent condition otherwise.

 

May need to crack it open and see how good the thermal pads are.

 

^ What he said,I would think that is way to hot.

 

I considered that the paste/pads might be the issue, but it isn't just the cpu that's hot. Everything is hot. The bottom of the laptop is hot and the SSD sensor reports 120 degrees F, indicating that heat is getting to the chassis for dissipation. I did notice that both cores seem to be always running at max frequency (2993mhz) even on the balanced power plan. The laptop was "seller refurbished". Could he have missed some software that helps throttle the cpu?

 

Ok then,what OS are you running,what antivirus is installed if any and what % of use is the hard drive showing,I see something like this every so often.

 

Windows 7 Pro 64 bit SP1, Comodo free Internet Security Suite, hard drive is seeing minimal use it's just idling basically, CPU is at 25% usage (quite steady) and is running at 100% or higher (turbo boost) all the time, as per the resource monitor.

 

Ok,not what I suspected. Was the unit restored to factory,in other words are all the Panasonic drivers there and are there any problems in the device manager. I suspect you may want to go to Intel's site and run their driver update for the CPU drivers. Just a guess.

 

I believe the seller does the restoration himself. I see no question marks or exclamation points under Device Manager. What driver were you referring to? A driver package for a CPU is news to me. And Panasonic's driver website is absolutely the worst ever.

 

Since it doesn't have a fan this is how the 19 is cooled and gets the heat out.

A lot of times this means they loaded W7 and took a damp cloth and wiped off the dirt. I am not saying that is what this seller did...just saying.

No software that I am aware of. All toughnooks are throttled down at the factory to keep the heat down since there is no fan in it.

 

Yes I know they have no fan and the chassis is the heat dissipation device, but these numbers seem rather high. I am starting to think, after noticing it's always running at turbo boosts speeds, that this is the issue. However, why is it doing that when resources simply aren't being demanded by anything? And I bet that's exactly what refurbished means in this case, too. Most eBay sellers also take the liberty of installing pirated Microsoft Office and Adobe software while they're at it.

Could the BIOS settings have anything to do with it? I think there's a performance setting in there.

 

https://software.intel.com/en-us/tags/79595 This is what I was thinking of,not sure if it would be helpful or not.

 

It's normal when your CPU is very busy I've just ran CPU test for 30 seconds and it's 90C. i5-2520M is 35W CPU, not ULV.
But it has to complete a task and fall back ~45C on idle.

100C is a maximum for this CPU

This is where your heat borns
CPU has to be idle (2-3%) almost all the time, not 25% and turbo. Check for the tasks that use 25% of CPU (it's too much for a powerful 35W i5 2520M) and kill them all if they are not updates
I have such problems with Google Chrome sometimes, but for me it's a question of long battery life more than heat.

 

a problem that i have run into recently with "fresh" os installs is back in the windows "custom/power management" settings ...
the minimum cpu state is set to 100% !
setting this to 1% has fixed the cpu loading problem .
this happens with my pendrive universal installers ans universal .iso disks ...
the factory disks have not done this .

 

The factory recovery disk is the right way.

 

"a problem that i have run into recently with "fresh" os installs is back in the windows "custom/power management" settings ...
the minimum cpu state is set to 100% !"

it does have the Panasonic power management software installed. Would that make a difference? I checked the power settings and the minimum was 5%. Unfortunately, that is not the problem.

" 100C is a maximum for this CPU"

Yes, my bad, obviously that is what I meant. According to hwmonitor, it has actually hit this twice so far, without shutting off. I am wondering if hwmonitor is reporting accurately, since I thought all cpu's now have thermal overload protection.

 

To night I ran the 19 MK5 for about 5 hours watching Youtube music videos and then a couple of mp4 movies. It really never got as hot as I have seen it in the past. Above is a few pic's of hwmonitor.

 

Those are basically the same temps I'm getting. Looks like my machine is ok after all?

Does this mean I need to worry about using my new toughbook in a hot environment like the desert?

 

Well that's a good question. I used mine all last summer in a hot truck with GPS running and had no problems. My 19 only has 1620 hours on it

 

Well I am sure it will be fine on minimum performance mode...but is is suitable as a primary computer, chugging away on max performance or even balanced? Of course, dry desert air is better at sucking away heat. Still, now I am worried.

 

If you don't overload it's CPU while standing under direct sunlight - you will not have any problems with that. Though, I repeat, 25% CPU is too much on idle. Has to be 1-5%.
Always use umbrella in a desert. Both for you and your Toughbook

 

You really have nothing to worry about. The plant that I work at has around 20 CF-19's on our forklifts . From June until September it gets very hot. From 80 up to 110 degrees and we have no problems with them at all.

How many hours does yours have on it ??

 

Never could find out what was chewing up all that cpu. It is hovering near 0% now with occasional spikes to 16 or 25%. I checked the BIOS and it has 5950 hours on it. It's extremely clean though with hardly any marks compared to others I looked at. Since this seems to be important, is there some sort of maintenance I should do at a certain number of hours?

 

That's really not a lot of hours for a Toughbook. That is only 248 days if it was always on. I have seen them with up to 38,000 hours and still going strong. If it's in very good shape then it was well looked after.

 

Do those toughbook hours include standby mode, for example? Cause if so, my elitebook 8740w has almost gotten there!

 

Hibernation, sleep, standby are not counted according to this thread
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/how-run-time-bios-hours-is-counted.603387/

 

Is there anything to do like opening it up and cleaning or something like?

 

Some like to change the pads but me if it's working good I don't touch a thing. You could check the port covers on the power and USB to see if they close good but that's it. Don't be fooled by the cheap China port covers. They have no rubber seal on them to keep out water or dust.

 

Changing the thermal pads is a good idea. Especially if you get high performance replacements and also attend to the extension rail on the heat sink.
But the problem with a CF19 is that in order to change the thermal pads you must remove the motherboard completely.
It's a decent sized project, and not one I recommend to an inexperienced tinkerer.
I have done it several times and it still takes me probably 2 hours start to finish.

I would get into device manager and disable and delete all Intel thermal and power management items.
Then uninstall them. See if you have yellow flags. You should, if not delete again. Then install the Intel drivers from the Panasonic site. They are custom. The problem is if the generic drivers have a newer date it is very difficult to get them removed. Windows will always choose the newer ones and ignore the proper ones once the newer generic ones are installed.

 

TWO HOURS? I've done a few motherboards myself and two hours for an experienced user sounds as bad as anything I've ever attempted, if not worse. No thanks! I'll do the Intel driver thing, thanks for that tip.

 

you may want to sure the problem is hardware or software, if come from hardware you should refund it.but if come from software,it can be solve by recovery. the easy way is make a bootable linux usb disk and run it on idle, if thencou and temps normal that should be the software (driver) problem,order a recovery cd ! if boot to a linux and idle still hot, i think it should by come from hardware

 

I bet the problem was sucked out of a finger

 

I ended up returning it. I did follow the recommendation of installing a USB linux distro and checking the temps there. They were a little lower overall but still peaked rather high. Bottom line, most likely is as some of the forum members said, he did the wipe and reinstall win7 himself instead of using recovery discs and some important custom driver got missed. It's a shame as it was a very nice unit with a big ssd for a good price. I don't know why these so-called refurb guys don't get a bunch of restore discs and use them for all the machines.

 

Is he called the expert or the specialist guy, Lol...

ohlip

 

an "ex" is a "was" or "has-been" .
a "spurt" is a "drip under pressure" .
and there is the explanation .

 

They want them in and out the door as fast as possible. These so-called refurb guys want to spend no extra money on them. What kind of price was he asking for the one you returned??

 

600. But a lot of the slightly more expensive ones had obvious signs of heavy wear, and a almost mint MK5 was closer to a thousand. Next time I order a copy of the recovery discs and "refurbish" it myself!

 

I have a mk4 if you are interested.

 

Sadly, no. The 540m is just too slow for my needs. I'm actually considering a Mk6 next time because of the USB 3.0 and bluetooth 4.0.

 

I have tons of recovery discs as I learned that early on. Most of the guys here do and when I recover one,it's right.