I have an Acer Aspire 8930g with a p8400 and 9600M GT, Vista 32-bit Home Premium. I use the 'High Performance' power profile which should have the maximum CPU frequency at 100% all the time.

Until last night everything was fine and dandy, as it always has been. Last night I left utorrent on automatic shutdown, and the laptop plugged in. This afternoon I started up the computer for the first time after the automatic shutdown (never used it before). Performance Monitor shows that maximum CPU frequency is capped at 35%, despite being plugged in and being on the High Performance profile. LFS goes into a complete standstill every time on track, because there's not enough CPU power available.

There a hot-air outlet on the side of the laptop which in normal gaming spews out hot air (obviously). It felt eerily cool today, so I suspect a fan might have failed. I installed SpeedFan, it reports 36C for each core and 48C for the GPU in idle, but nothing at all on fans.

How can I be sure if it's blown a fan, or if it's safe to try and force the maximum CPU frequency back up to 100%?

You can usually see the fans spin, and hear them as they kick in and out or varying it's speed. The problem with notebooks, is that the air vents gets cluttered with dust and fibers, because people tend to leave them in their sofa, chair or something. So over time a layer of dust builds up blocking hot air from escaping. And as the cpu runs hotter and hotter, it clocks itself down to avoid overheating, essentially making it run slower and slower.

If it feels extremely hot when you hold your hand on the chassis around the mousepad area or underneath in the fan area, there could be a problem.

But 36C for each core should be fine, also indicating the fans are working. If it gets over 60C you have a problem. I've seen notebooks with temperatures well over 80C. You could literally fry an egg on them!

I had another look at the power profile I'm using, and it says 'Put the computer to sleep after' and the value is '30 mins'. I recall various problems with Windowses recovering from hibernate/sleep modes. How likely is it that sleep mode changed the CPU speed to minimum, but never changed back to full speed upon 'waking' or completely shutting down? Certainly sounds plausible imo.

I have a slider here that allows me to put the maximum speed back to 100%, but I don't want to do this until I'm sure none of the cooling components have failed..

Quote from NotAnIllusion :

I had another look at the power profile I'm using, and it says 'Put the computer to sleep after' and the value is '30 mins'. I recall various problems with Windowses recovering from hibernate/sleep modes. How likely is it that sleep mode changed the CPU speed to minimum, but never changed back to full speed upon 'waking' or completely shutting down? Certainly sounds plausible imo.

Yep that could be the case.

Quote :

I have a slider here that allows me to put the maximum speed back to 100%, but I don't want to do this until I'm sure none of the cooling components have failed..

I think it should be alright doing it. Anyways, computers these days have fail-safe mechanisms in case of overheating, so they either shut down or underclock themselves. If the fans are completely dead, you would notice it pretty fast.

Agreed, you can safely restore the CPU clock to 100%, modern CPU's can't be fried, there is a temperature threshold, which, when exceeded, triggers automatic shutdown.

But what if the sensor is damaged from the heat

I'd pretty much sold myself anyways, I've upped the max CPU back to 100% and nothing's blown up yet. I played a bit of Carom3D to test it out. A bit strange how the GPU temp goes up and down, but the CPU core readouts haven't changed a degree all day. They probably don't even update properly

Ty guys

...I'd be surprised if speedfan supported any notebooks let alone yours, the fact it's not reporting on fan speed simply implys that speedfan can't read the sensors for the many many different notebook types out there I assume this is the case.

It appears to read the GPU temp, because the readout varies with useage as expected. Peaked at almost 95C.. Why it, or CoreTemp fail to read the CPU core temps properly I don't know. Even while on LFS MP and GPU at 92C, the cores are reported as 36/36 I wasn't really surprised about not being able to see the fans, I suppose they're all made a bit different to squeeze them in, but it would have been nice.

Quote from MadCatX :

Agreed, you can safely restore the CPU clock to 100%, modern CPU's can't be fried, there is a temperature threshold, which, when exceeded, triggers automatic shutdown.

in notebooks the cpu is the last thing to fail from overheating.

the rest of the system will give up long before the cpu will.

for example, some mobile bartons have a max operational temp of 100C

do you think the innards of a laptop can withstand that kind of temperature? most motherboards give up when they reach 75-80. nvidia chipsets start giving problems when overheating.

Quote from george_tsiros :

do you think the innards of a laptop can withstand that kind of temperature? most motherboards give up when they reach 75-80. nvidia chipsets start giving problems when overheating.

True. Damn HP Pavilions with Nvidia GPU's!!

In case you care - the P8600 is rated for up to 105° C.

http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SLGA4

EDIT - Probably not the right stepping i'll admit but all the P8600 have the same thermal tolerance.

who the hell can make a 25W cpu reach >100C?

Harjun can.