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CPU running hot?
I have a question which might seem incredibly silly, but I am asking it seriously.
I am using a desktop with ASUS motherboard with AMD Sempron CPU and 2GB RAM. The ASUS board replaces the original Asrock board which failed (not due to overheating or any discernable reason). Some time back I downloaded mbmon from the Debian archive and checked it out against the BIOS readings, and found that its temperature readings agree with the BIOS readout. According to the BIOS, my system will shut the system down if the CPU temperature reaches 65 degrees C (149 degrees F). (I could apparently change that if I knew it were safe to set it higher.) From mbmon, I know that my CPU temperature is typically about 56 degrees C (133 degrees F). Today I have been running something CPU intensive. It's now at 62 degrees (144 degrees F). I have never had a shutdown due to overheating and don't know what to expect, but it doesn't sound good! Any suggestions? Somewhat to my suprise, none of this seems to be affecting the fans.
Hmmm... while I was writing this post, I did the obvious thing and shutdown the process which I thought was overworking the CPU, but my CPU continued to crank away almost as hard as before. The problem was an (orphaned?) whiptail process due to a foulup with another program which I think called it. When I killed the whiptail process the CPU load immediately fell off to a tiny fraction, so I guess the temperature should begin to fall soon.
Whew... while I was writing the last paragraph, the CPU temperature fell right back to 56 degrees C (133 degrees F)! Wow, that was fast!
Even so, can anyone tell me whether any of these temperatures sound as high to an expert as they do to me? How hard should I try to avoid getting close to 65 degrees C again? I assume the motherboard is very reliable, but would it slow the CPU or actually shut down the machine if I hit 65 degrees? If the latter, would linux do a clean shutdown?
I really doubt that this is relevant, but I am using kernel 2.6.10 under MEPIS.
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