CPU Temperature at 99 degrees

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Hi, when doing calculations on my notebook (dell latitude 7490), the CPU temperature often quickly reaches 99 degrees and stays there. The only way to get it to throttle is to unplug it from AC.

99 degrees can damage the CPU, can I somehow prevent that from happening?

2

Hi @jacob, and welcome!

a Very important question, is it 99° Fahrenheit or Celsius. Because Fahrenheit is not too bad. If it’s Celsius, I’m wondering why it hasn’t spontaneously combusted yet…

Edit:
To throttle it, you can always use your CPU gorvernor.

Edit 2:
And thanks to this thread, I now have a list of other CPU throttling applications, thanks everyone!

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Something like this?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CPU_frequency_scaling

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I don’t know if it’s a normal use case or if there are issues from your your system. But Dell is known to consider that 100°C is the max using temperature for its Intel CPUs. And that reaching these temperatures do not damage the components. Other studies claim 60-70° are preferable…

Anyway Dell laptops tend to heat more than other brands as they don’t particularly stress on heat reduction.

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How old is that laptop anyway, maybe the amount/quality/appliance of thermal paste was atrocious in your case and it is practically dry by now :slight_smile: (if we are talking about 99° Celcius ofc)

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My Dell Latitude 6520 is from 2011.
A 7490 should be fairly recent.

Edit, just one random link, seems to be a model prone to thermal issues
https://www.dell.com/community/Latitude/Latitude-7490-Overheating/td-p/6073431

1 Like
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10 years? As tuxmanjarino said your thermic paste is gone and you need to put some fresh one. It is also time to do an inside cleaning: Open your laptop, take the dust away, check and clean the CPU fan. You should do that every 3-4 years form now on, it is a good habit. Search for some “how to disassemble + your model” tutorial on youtube. Some laptops are easy to access CPU, others requires a complete disassemble, screen included… Hopefully your is one of the easy one. With pacience and order you will manage. Put the screws in a little box, otherwise you will surely lost a couple of them, Murphy law is a -bip-…

Not bad? You mean so perfect that it is impossible: 99 Fahrenheit degrees are around 10 Celsius degrees… Unless you live in a igloo or have some oil tanker or use your laptop in a freezer you will never get such a low temperature :slightly_smiling_face:

edit: Ups, my mistake: The first converter i used is bad, 99Âş Fahrenheit are around 37Âş Celsius. Saying so this would be very good result. It is normal and no harm to have 40-50Âş (celsius) degrees in a laptop CPU.

1 Like
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Oh it’s working fine, don’t worry for me :smile:
I don’t perform so many laptop care, I’ll try when I have time.

When I ditched Windows, he became youth again with Linux!

As for the OP, I think first his model would overheat even in Windows. But maybe some tlp or laptop-mode-tools tweaking could help.

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Did you:

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Thanks for all the kind replies.
The notebook is rather new (1.5 years) and I know why I am reaching the high temperature, I am running numerical experiments. I also see all 8 CPU threads maxing out at 100% when doing this. The problem is not that I do not understand the reason for the high temperature. I just thought that running at 99 degrees (Celcius) could damage the Laptop. But if @Falav is right, then maybe its not a problem.
tlp is enabled. I can try auto-cpufreq. I thought that there is maybe a way to configure Manjaro s.t. it throttles automatically when reaching such high temperatures (if that is actually necessary, I am now not so sure anymore).

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Well, according to me it’s still high, but if it’s “normal” it’s probably OK. Still don’t like it, though.

You can check out Thermald in the AUR:

pamac build thermald

According to its website:

The project provides a Linux user mode daemon to system developers, reducing time to market with controlled thermal management using P-states, T-states, and the Intel power clamp driver. The Thermal Daemon uses the existing Linux kernel infrastructure and can be easily enhanced.

Hope it helps!