How high a temperature is dangerous in A31?

[tbessie]

I've installed a 2.4Ghz Pentium-M in my A31, and now when I do processor-intensive tasks (like audio & video format conversions), the processor heat gets pretty high.

Normal, quiescent processor heat is around 45-50 degrees celsius, but it gets up to 80-85 degrees celcius during these operations.

Does anyone know if that could be considered dangerous?

- Tim

[FuguTabetai]

I'm curious about this too. I have an A31 2652-D4U 1.6 GHz P4m which runs hot generally (I keep hard drives in both the left and right bays, using it as an appletalk / samba fileserver on fedora core 4.)

Since I've been running the machine 24x7 for the past three or four years or so, it would usually run at about 60 deg C idle, and around 74 or so when I use it. It starts to smell like burning plastic at 91 deg C though. Since the temperature has been going up and up, and got particularly bad about a week back, I bought some arctic silver thermal grease, cleaned up the fan, and applied that.

Now it runs generally at 55 deg C, so I would say you are fine. That's just one datapoint though.

Do you know if it is possible to control the fan via software? For a long time I wanted to make the fan run at max speed (maybe it is at max now?) but I can't control it with /proc/acpi/fan (no entry) or /proc/acpi/ibm/fan (no fan there either.) I don't see any way to control the fan with SpeedFan or the like on windows either.

[a31pguy]

Welcome to the P4m 2.5 - hot running CPU. I've found that it will throttle back at 85C. So - the Intel Spec says around 90-95C on the P4m is too hot. But it will throttle back to 1.2 ghz before that.

The answer on the fan control - no. In the A31 series it's hardcoded into the embedded controller and it's directly related to three heat sensors on the mainboard.

[tbessie]

Yeah, when I installed the new processor I used Arctic Silver as well, so it's as good as it can get right now, pretty much.

I'm glad it'll throttle down when it gets too hot. Probably not GOOD for it to get hot enough to need to be throttled, I'd suppose, but at least I know it won't overheat.

Thanks for the info!

- Tim

[a31pguy]

Yes, practically speaking, it's a good as it gets. When I was gaming on this laptop - I put some flat HDD fans into an ultrabay weight saver and made an "ultrabay" fan sled - which helped keep the CPU from throttling back under load. But that's about it. It's just the design of the P4. Best to keep in adaptive mode, keeps the temperature down.