Inaccurate temperatur monitoring / Acer 5742G overheating ?

Hi

I have a question regarding temperature monitoring programs like RealTemp or Speedfan (I tried some and they all show the same). I know that the temperatures shown are not 100% accurate, but since my Acer 5742G used to overheat in the past and I tried several things to fix that (including sending it back to Acer, cleaning the fans which is difficult with this model, using a cooling pad, etc.), I am curious about the temperatures shown.

If I for instance quit a game after some time of playing, RealTemp shows say a high 85°C (both GPU and processors), but the very next second it drops a good 10-15°C, even more in the next seconds. So, is my temperature really at some point as high as the maximum shown by the program, or is this fast drop just a sign of false monitoring ?
What makes me wonder in addition is that normally when the PC overheats and is at it's maximum, the performance will be much worse, but I do not experience that at all, the game runs just as smooth as when I started it from a cold state.

Acer Aspire 5742G-464G75Mnkk
Intel Core i5 480M @ 2.67GHz
nVidia GT 540M
4 GB SDRAM
750GB SATA HDD
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit


Thanks
palebluedot

 

Hm...
One of the most accurate programs for temperature monitoring would be HWiNFO64.
You could get it here and check what your temperatures under that program are:
HWiNFO64 Download

On top of that, your best bet in reducing temperatures and avoiding overheating in the process would be to manually clean the area between the fan and air vents (and of course clean out the fan itself using a paint brush for example).
Another option is to re-apply the thermal paste on the cpu (and maybe even the GPU).

Given the potential difficulty you mentioned in cleaning out the laptop manually (which indicates that Acer designed this model so that it requires FULL dis-assembly), a temporary sto-gap measure such as using the compressed air can could be considered - but as I said before, your best bet is to open the laptop and thoroughly clean it out yourself.

As for high temperatures showing 85 degrees C and then suddenly dropping by 10-15 deg C after quitting the game...
Well, that is to be expected because you basically STOPPED taxing the CPU/GPU.
But one would hope the temperatures would go down by a larger amount than mere 10-15 degrees (although, it may take the system time to cool down).
That said, 85 degrees C when gaming sounds like its within tolerable levels - but I would surmise its possible to reduce those temperatures a bit with above mentioned methods.

 

^totally agree with Deks

you can also try lots more monitoring tools found in my sig below.

 

I will give HWiNFO64 a try.

What makes cleaning the air vents more difficult is that the openings are rather small, I doubt not even the pipe of a compressed air can could be inserted there, so I tried widening them a bit. That makes the space between the fan and the air vents the biggest problem because of the difficult access.
I will still give the compressed air a go as soon as I get my hands on it.

I also removed a bit from the fan grill at the bottom, that helped me removing some big chunks of dust, and I only adopted this drastic measure because I don't have warranty on that notebook anymore anyway. However, a lot of dust is still stuck on the fan itself and I will try cleaning it with a paint brush.

As for a total disassembly, I already started that once but I am no expert, so perhaps I gonna ask some friends who have more knowledge about that.

And about the temperatures after I quit gaming, I mentioned the 10-15 degrees because they fall within a second, but of course the notebook continues to cool down in the following seconds quite fast.


Thanks a lot for your reply.

 

You are welcome.

As for dis-assembly... I recommend you try finding a dis-assembly guide online for your laptop in order to aid you in the process, because it would appear the only way to properly clean that thing and bring those temperatures down even further might be just that.

Finally... I have to say I utterly dislike manufacturers who design laptops in a manner where you need to dis-assemble all of it to get to the inner components.
I suspect that part of the reason they do this is to prevent people from doing it themselves and bring in the laptop to them for cleaning.
In the long run, people won't be able to clean up the laptop which will inherently have a limited life-expectancy (lower than one might have initially hoped for, even if all their computing needs are met by older hardware).