Member Avatar for somjit{}

1st of all , let me mention my hardware :

HP G6 laptop with win8 :
amd a4 4300M, radeon graphics : 512 MB 7420G + 1GB 7670M , 4 gb 1600 Mhz ram.

4 yr old Desktop running xp sp2 :
amd athlon x2 250 , inbuilt graphics : 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 7025 / NVIDIA nForce 630a, ram : 2gb DDR2 800Mhz ,

Long Story short : i think speccy doesnt give accurate results on win8 + HP hardware , or , is bugged somehow , and causes CPU temp to shoot to astronomical levels.
if you care about how i come to say this , read below :

I wanted to note the CPU temerature of my laptop , and i have always been a speccy user , so installed the latest speccy in the lappy , and ran it. i was surprised to see an idle temperature over 86 degrees Centigrade. i ran a kasperky scan , and it went upto 120 degrees !! i thought it must be a mistake , so i installed coreTemp , and a bunch of other monitors. All showed the same readings !

whereas , in my desktop , they all show an idle temp of around 33 deg (recently changed the thermal paste) and under load ( Photoshop rendering ) it went upto a max of around 44 deg.

it has been around a week since this event , iv contacted hp , and an engineer had visited , opened up the laptop and changed the thermal paste ( a note on this later ) , but still no use. Speccy continued to show 85 deg plus. so did the other monitors. frustrated i unistalled them all and stopped using my laptop.

only about an hour ago , i read about OpenHardwareMonitor , and as a last attempt , thought id give it a try , as i hadnt used it earlier. i ran it on the lappy , and SURPRISE : idle temp around 36 deg!!
i ran a kaspersky scan , and even under 70% cpu usage , temp hardly touched over 45 degrees !
but as soon as i ran speccy to cross check , OpenHardwareMonitor's temperature shot upto the 85+ mark , and speccy showed the same. and even after i closed speccy , OpenHardwareMonitor still showed 85+ temp while idle.
i restart , run OpenHardwareMonitor again , and temp has so far not gone up above 45 , and for the majority of the time , stays below 36-38 degrees.

i am assuming speccy had some bugs which caused this to happen.
i share this here hoping it might be of use to somebody else.

ps :

  1. my friend also has the same model laptop , and there also , speccy is acting exactly the same as it did on mine.
  2. the HP engineer slobbered the APU with thermal paste , i mean like he put WAAAY TO MUCH paste there , and i am sure when the heat-sink sat in , the paste would have spread out of the die area and into the surrounding region. i would like to know if there is any potential damage it may cause ?
Edited by somjit{}
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Member Avatar for gerbil

Shouldn't do any damage. The quality pastes are non-conductive electrically, non-corrosive. The worst it could do is harden a wee bit and make it ever so slightly more difficult to lift the CPU out one day.
Interesting about the monitors. I use Core Temp on an Intel CPU... it's just fine, and believable.
I don't know where your other moonitors get their info from... some query the system monitor chip's outputs eg a Winbond chip; some can read the CPU's temperatures directly from their sensors eg CPUID. I have that one, too, and if I check now, it agrees with Core Temp. I set Core Temp to output to the systray.
85 is not going to cook a CPU [if it is the real temp], but under 60 is nice for hard work, and 35 or less for idle [a bit dependent on ambient].
Are the softwares giving strange readings suited to your mb and CPU?

Member Avatar for somjit{}

yeah i think i read about CPUID and coreTemp both getting their info from the diodes/sensors underneath the chip.

Are the softwares giving strange readings suited to your mb and CPU?

I didnt know about the suited part . Do monitors have this compatibility issue ? i wasnt aware of this .
However , on my desktop - coreTemp , CPUID , speccy all three agree , maybe because the hardware is old and was easily compatible with the versions i tried. But in my laptop , CPUID ( OpenHardwareMonitor ) seems to be giving the correct readings , whereas Speccy makes the cpu go upto 85+. and i think it really MAKES the cpu go to 85+ instead of just showing wrong data , because the exhaust air feels very hot once Speccy starts running. Maybe speccy isnt compatible with the HP+win8 combination.

iv ran kaspersky scans (without ever starting speccy after turning on the laptop) yesterday , and even with full load , the apu temp stayed under control and the exhaust air was much cooler than even in idle+speccy mode.

i think i remember that coreTemp also showed believable (35-45 temp range) readings , but i didnt notice at that point that turning on speccy was causing the temperature rise.

Edited by somjit{}
Member Avatar for gerbil

"and i think it really MAKES the cpu go to 85+ "...."Maybe speccy isnt compatible "
Around about this time, you rip it out and go with what works; there are plenty of good options. For sys info, i use either msinfo32 [RUN that one], or siw.exe [gurgle for that].
Msinfo32 is okay for the basics, siw.exe is comparable to or even better than speccy. My judgement. More info than you'll ever need.

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