AMD A6 APU overheating... but not really?

[Raduque]

My sister called me about her laptop, because she says it's overheating while playing the Sims 3. It didn't shut down, but she says it's very hot to the touch.

I installed Furmark, cpu-z, hwmonitor, coretemp and AMD Overdrive. HWMonitor shows the idle temp of the CPU as being about 120C. Yes, Celsius. Coretemp won't even read it, and AMD Overdrive says it's about 3c away from tMax. 4

Running Furmark, temps in HWMonitor went up to about 137C, and AOD says the thermal margin is -17c.

The laptop doesn't seem to throttle and it doesn't crash. The GPU (7520G) runs at about 62c under load.

The laptop is about a two year old Gateway, and airflow doesn't seem to be an issue.

Is it simply that nothing can read the temps correctly, or is there some underlying issue here?

 

[BSim500]

It's possible the heatsink / heatpipe has come away from the CPU slightly. Or maybe it's a sensor fault. Try turning the laptop off overnight, then first thing tomorrow - boot up (after it's had several hours to cool down) - and quickly check the temp in HWMonitor immediately after boot before it's had time to run anything & heat up.

 

[Raduque]

I turned it off and let it sit for two hours and when I turned it back on, it was already reading 100c.

I guess it's a sensor fault.

 

[ph2000]

faulty heatpipe can also cause this
my old acer has this issue, the heat is not transferred to the other side
check the air coming from the vent is it hot ?

 

[thomasjkenney]

The only programs I've seen that accurately report the temps for these APUs is Asus AI Suite (YUCK!) and SpeedFan. I have 2 A10-5800Ks, and use SpeedFan to monitor temps. With stock coolers, my A10's were running 74C under load and 38C idle, and with cheap Zalman 'flower' coolers they run around 62C under load and 32C idle.

If you can, open the laptop and clean any heat sinks. My friend's Dell regularly accumulates a 'carpet' of lint and dust on one of the heat sinks. First clue this is happening is constant loud fan noise.