7970M high temperatures in Far Cry 3 and other games

Hello,

I recently bought Far Cry 3 and I've been wondering what the safe running temperatures of a laptop GPU are. My drivers are 13.6 beta3 and 2932 for Intel. Far Cry 3 runs at 100-102 degrees constantly and I'm a bit worried that this is too much. This happens regardless of the settings (I only run it on DX9 as DX11 is full of glitches). This might be a special case as the attached graph shows weird behaviour I've never seen before, Core clock constantly alternating between 450 and 850 MHz, and utilization doing the same for 64% and 100%.

Most other games run at 92 degrees, even older games like UT3. Some others reach 102 if I max the settings, but it's usually manageable. Is that something I should be worried about? I try to clean the fans of dust monthly or so, but don't go as far as using compressed air or cleaning the heatsink and repasting.

 

Well I belive that the downclocking is caused by thermal throtling as temperature above 100 degrees isnt safe at all. This looks like a bad paste job. There are micro bubles that can appear in the paste and result in ridicilously high temperatures. Deffinitelly do a paste job, and also you can clean your fans and grills better when you'll unmount the heatsink. There are plenty manuals here in the forums, or on youtube how to do a good paste job. Its not a hard thing to do. Also I would recommend getting a notebook cooler, or just raise the back of your laptop to ensure better airflow while gaming - in my case this causes a 10 degree diffrence.

 

anything over 90c is not good and as mahalsk said it will throttle down to protect the hardware.

cleaning vents and fans every few months with compressed air is a must as its the biggest contributor to high temps.
a repaste sounds like a good idea as well.

 

Thanks for the replies. I already have a notebook cooler which is constantly on, but it looks like I have to do a repaste and properly clean the fans urgently. I probably need to do the same for my CPU as well.

 

Check for any cracks or possible damage to the heat pipe as well, and avoid ESD damage as best you can by grounding yourself when you open it up!

 

Thanks, the problem was dust after all. I removed the fans on both the CPU and GPU and there was a thick layer of dust covering the heatsink exhaust vent. I cleaned it off and now my temps don't go above 80 on Far Cry, and they're much lower on other games.

 

glad it helped. which thermal paste did you use?

 

glad we heard is all fine!!

 

u should take care of properly cleaning out ur machine every 3-6 months or so, depending on your surroundings!

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

Thanks everyone.

I didn't actually repaste, The problem was the dust stuck between the fan and the heatsink exhaust vent. All I did was scrub it off gently with a cotton bud.

 

Good to hear! Every 3 - 6 months sounds about right for a cleaning, as well.