System standby lowers CPU temperatures???

[Ilander]

So, I own a magma-hot processor, and often, it runs at temperatures that would inflict a vicious injury upon me if I could touch it. It is not uncommon for me to have temperatures of 55 degrees Celsius when I'm gaming (measured with speedfan). My computer also takes forever to start up, I think mostly because of my RAID 5 array.

So, I remember I can put the thing in stand-by rather than shutting it down, and that will make it start up much faster in the morning, when I turn it back on.

Well, yes. It did that. It reduced start time by probably two minutes, which is unfathomable to me. BUT, even more bizarre...speedfan told me that my processor was running at 19 degrees!

I have never seen my processor run at less than 35. Never. And yet, here it is, running at 19, and it slowly heated up to an idle temperature of 25. Once I had some applications open, it boosted it to 31, where it currently stays.

Wow. I mean, wow. I always assumed that my processor was just made to run at 40 degrees Celsius.

Anyone able to tell me why this happens or replicate my results?

I have a guess, but I'll wait to see if it's right.

[Bungleau]

Thoughts that come to mind....

• Speedfan was broken, and now isn't
• Speedfan wasn't broken, and now is
• A fan or something got loosened up and is now working
• The rooster of doom is playing mind games with you
• The computer is in a spot where it's normally hot, and by having it on all night, it internally got cooled down

Have you checked the temp with another source?

[Ilander]

My computer was sitting in the middle of the room, now it's in a hole in my desk...ventilation has not increased, but has instead decreased. Also Speedfan shows the same temperatures for the other items (hard disk, graphics card, motherboard). My fans have all worked from the day I got them.

Hosscat (the computer) has always ran hot. I used to joke that it heated my dormroom during the winter, and I wasn't far off. Sadly, I expect that whenever I turn on a game, it will go right back to being magma-hot (and you can tell, it makes the surrounding space very warm!).

My thought is this: When the system is booting, the BIOS runs the CPU at 100% until the OS throttles it down. This time spent running at 100% heats it up to the temperature I'm used to seeing it run at, and then, the OS can't do anything about it, because the system is in thermal equilibrium...the fans can't exhaust the heat fast enough to lower the temperature.

I bypassed the BIOS part of the boot by leaving the system in standyby, and the CPU cooled to room temperature. Then, I turned on the computer, and it booted Windows, with Windows keeping the CPU throttled back the entire time, instead of wide-open. The system is still in thermal equilibrium, as the CPU is generating the same amount of waste energy (heat) as the fans dissipate, except without the initial boost.

If that's true, then the same thing should happen on pretty much anyone's computer.

Oh, and I just checked with my motherboard utility (ABit EQ), and it yielded the same results.

[ 09-07-2006, 05:03 PM: Message edited by: Ilander ]