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[Kugerfang]

Anyone have an idea what the proper temp for a PC should be? I get 60 on my CPU and GPU when surfing the web and about 65 when playing videogames. Is this good? I'm asking because I want to buy a new PC case (and fans) for cooling and I want to make sure that my cost is justified.

*All temps in celsius. Fahrenheit should die.

[_r.u.s.s.]

it's good

[Japo]

If the temperature when the processors are being trashed is only 5º above the one when they're idle, you can guess yourself. (Because CPU usage is really little above 0% when surfing, right?)

[Kugerfang]

I've decided to replace my case anyway because my current case looks like crap anyway and has crap ventilation.

[_r.u.s.s.]

obviously, it doesn't have `crap ventilation` when your temperatures were good..

[Kugerfang]

I actually took another set of readings today. CPU jumped to about 70 after about an hour of surfing the web and to 75 after playing Company of Heroes for about 2 hours. And I don't consider that to be good temps.

[_r.u.s.s.]

that is still bearable, you'd wonder what temperatures some notebooks have for example

[The Fifth Horseman]

Frankly I'd say the idle temperature is a bit too high... unless I'm out of synch on the current standards and "acceptable" temperatures are nowadays defined as "anything short of causing immediate meltdown".

[Japo]

Do you a hear loud fan noise? Comfort is also a factor...

As Russ says you don't really need to change the case, if the temperature were too high you'd learn soon enough, the CPU would likely shut itself down safely before getting too hot.

And actually the biggest factor is the CPU itself, not the case. Nowadays chip design is more oriented towards minimum heat per Hz than to Hz alone. If they need more processing power they just use more cores. My current computer has 17% less speed per core compared to the last one, but twice as many (4), so the overall processing power is around 2x (since benchmark tests show that parallel processing increases the overall speed above the nominal multiplier). And perhaps more importantly, the fan noise is immensely lower--like unnoticeable vs. really annoying.

Originally Posted by The Fifth Horseman

Frankly I'd say the idle temperature is a bit too high... unless I'm out of synch on the current standards and "acceptable" temperatures are nowadays defined as "anything short of causing immediate meltdown".

As I said nowadays temperatures are actually lower than a year ago. But again if you experience no crashes, it's good. Noise annoyance is up to you to judge. If you're so worried about your processor melting down, just wait till it does and then you replace it with a more efficient, and faster one.

Anyway I was also in the idea that a normal temperature was 60º C or lower. But the most important thing you can fix is if some process is eating an abnormal amount of CPU. Check the Task Manager. I have it always running minimized, with the option not to show in the task bar, so the tray icon shows a CPU usage graph, and I immediately notice it if some process is eating one whole core or more.

[Kugerfang]

I looked up my proc (Q9550) and I found out that it's only rated up to 71c. Since I'm idling at 60 and playing at 75, I think it's time to break the bank account to buy a new case and fans.