Is your PC clean and free of dust (including radiator)?.Here's a checklist of things to look for: If under load your CPU temperature is exceeding 80 degrees Celsius, you should check your system to ensure the CPU's cooling is adequate. What Should I Do if my CPU Temperature Is too High? Anything between 80 and 95 degrees may have room for improvement. Again, if this figure is at or beyond 95 degrees, you should be concerned. With Core Temp, the best way to monitor your temperature while gaming is to just have a good session, and then check back in with the program to see what the maximum recorded temperature is. The stress test temperature was achieved by running Prime95 for about 30 minutes, though the CPU hit its maximum temperature of 75 degrees Celsius within 10 minutes. You can click on this block to access further details, as shown in the image below.Īs you can see, this CPU has been running at a temperature of 46 degrees Celsius and a maximum of 75 degrees Celsius (167 degrees Fahrenheit) and is, therefore, running at a normal temperature. The first block features the CPU's status, which shows the load, temperature, clock speed and cooler fan speed. Once installed, CAM offers a well-presented user interface (UI). While it's intended to be used with their product, it works really well as a casual monitoring tool even if you don't own any NZXT hardware. These three are just a few examples of many, and for the purpose of this how-to we'll show you how NZXT's CAM and Core Temp work because we have found that these two are the easiest to use for casual purposes.ĬAM is developed by PC case, power supply and CPU cooler manufacturer NZXT. Examples of these programs are HWMonitor, Core Temp, or NZXT's CAM.
How to Monitor Your CPU's TemperatureĬhecking your CPU temperature is as easy as firing up a monitoring program and using it to read out the value. We consider an ideal stress test to be one hour long, though your maximum temperature will likely level off after 10-15 minutes.
When running such a stress test, keep a close eye on the temperatures, using the tools mentioned below, and back off once they reach too high a number, i.e. More advanced users who want the utmost confidence that their CPU can handle aggressive workloads should stress test their CPU to 100% using a program like Prime95 or AIDA64. At this point, some CPUs will begin throttling, meaning the clock speed will slow down to ensure it doesn't overheat, and your PC may turn off. You have some wiggle room to creep past 80 degrees Celsius, but anything above 95 degrees Celsius (203 degrees Fahrenheit) is critical. Under load, you want your CPU to ideally stay under 80 degrees Celsius (176 degrees Fahrenheit), though some CPUs may run hotter when they're in ultrabooks, gaming laptops, or small-form-factor (SFF) computers. This is more important than idle temperatures (assuming idle temps are fine) and you'll want to periodically monitor your CPU temperature under load to ensure it's adequately cooled during such conditions. Under higher load, such as when playing a game, rendering a video, or other intensive tasks, your CPU consumes more power and, thus, runs at a higher temperature.
When the CPU is idle, or not being used by any program, a healthy temperature is anything under or around 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit).