How to maintain Lower CPU Temperature

Question

1) How to maintain low CPU temperature ?.

2) What are the factors that cause high CPU Temperature ?

3) what are the chances of damaging my motherboard due to excessive heat released from processor, hard-drive , additional chip-sets. etc

Answer 1

1) How to maintain low CPU temperature?

Apply proper cooling in your computer. Also, make sure your CPU runs on an "on demand" or "powersave" mode. This will put your CPU speed setting to as low as possible. (On demand puts it as high as your computer "demands".) Also, disable CPU eating background services and processes that will cause your CPU to run at full capacity.

2) What are the factors that cause high CPU Temperature?

When more is asked of your CPU, the clock of the CPU is turned up to allow more calculations per second to be made. A higher frequency will also mean more electricity will pass through the circuits, causing more heating of the CPU. So the more processes demand CPU time, the hotter the CPU will be.

Next to CPU usage, also the cooling is a factor that can cause a higher or lower CPU temperature. The better the cooling used, the lower the CPU's temperature will be at high performance.

3) what are the chances of damaging my motherboard due to excessive heat released from processor, hard-drive, additional chip-sets. etc

Newer motherboards have lots of fail saves that also monitor CPU temperature. Once it gets too high, the motherboard will disable the CPU and shut down automatically. So the chances are quite slim that damage will be done to other components due to excessive heating.

This is not the case when you're running the CPU whilst being cooled and suddenly remove the cooling whilst in operation. This will most likely result in a nice hole in the circuit board of your motherboard. Not so desirable. Moral: Don't turn on a computer without CPU cooling.

Nice addition from Chris S's comment:

While many MBs do auto-shutdown when overheating; getting to that point often inflicts small damage that may build up over time, and constantly operating near that limit will do the same. Best to steer clear of the limits.

This is true, that's why most BIOSes have the fail saves set so that it's within reasonable parameters. Changing these temperature values would not be smart if you're concerned about damage due to heating of the CPU! ;)

Answer 2

I will answer each question, but you should consider if CPU cooling is even affecting your performance based off what system you have. In this is experiment it is proven that CPU cooling does not affect performance. In fact it the showed that forcibly preventing airflow and occupying all the space in a case does not affect CPU performance.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=lrEHoVgfMjU

However, you may have an older computer and this might not apply to you.

So now on to my answer.

Here are some options that are subjective and may not apply to your situation.

1) How to maintain low CPU temperature ?

a. Install a clean installation of Windows. (This is surprisingly the best solution for most situations)

b. Squirt the absolute smallest amount of WD40 in your CPU fan on the motor if you can. (I did this on an aging laptop fan and it kept it cooler and almost completely silent. There's probably a more PC lubricant but I used WD40)

c. Spray canned air to get any dust out.

d. Buy a better heat sink or thermal paste (not recommended by me)

2) What are the factors that cause high CPU Temperature ?

a. Windows is the #1 cause of overheating. I'm sure I'm going to get comments disagreeing with me but I'm going to say it anyway. Overtime it needs to be refreshed with a clean installation. Some may argue this fact but I've found it to be true over the years. You would not even be aware of the background apps that accumulate over time. Sometimes even if you're careful windows seems to mess up itself and slow everything down and overheat.

b. aging components

c. weak fan that is aging.

d. background processes you don't know about.

e. malware (which i guess could be d but I'm giving it its own section.)

3) what are the chances of damaging my motherboard due to excessive heat released from processor, hard-drive , additional chip-sets. etc

Very slim to extremely likely. This is going to be completely subjective based off how old your system is. I want to say that 90% of computers people use today are going to have a failsafe and turn off before they get that hot. Most CPUs will throttle themselves before they get that hot. Actually there exist totally fan-less windows computers and they depend on being able to slow themselves down instead of overheating. So if your temperature sensor becomes faulty you are pretty much walking on thin ice and I'd say its very likely to overheat. So to summarize - In most cases NO, your stuff isn't going to self-destruct unless you're overclocking or doing some ridiculous stuff

Answer 3

Here is a good cooling guide from Toms Hardware for the 1156 Intel processor, but the concepts work for all CPU's.

There's another article stating whether using the stock fan is good enough

And finally there's an article comparing simple water cooling versus air cooling