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I have been rendering quite long animation with my laptop and decided to check the CPU temperatures. I render on my GPU, but the processor (intel i5-8300h) is much hotter. Most of the time the temperatures are fine, but sometimes they hit max (100°C), but just for a really short while (not even a second). I wonder if it's okay or dangerous for the processor... enter image description here

Here are the temperatures during a 40 minutes rendering session. Left column is for current temperatures, the middle one is for min temps, and the right one is for max temps which appeared during rendering.

FilipBlend
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    This isn't the right place to ask-- we aren't focused on those kinds of questions. Try https://superuser.com/ , an SE site with hardware jurisdiction. My inclination is that no, those are not okay or safe (hence the red.) You shouldn't be able to cook beans on your CPU. – Nathan May 10 '21 at 20:48

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The short answer is that you're probably fine.

Personal aside: there have always been these arguments about thermal stress on computer components, ranging from "turning off your pc at night is bad" to "overclocking reduces the lifetime of your components". It's just a fact that most PC hardware outlives its useful lifespan, and it's either thrown in a landfill or recycled, so I mostly ignore these arguments. Obviously heating something up to the point it turns off while you're using it is bad, but a modern processor monitors its own temperature and will underclock when it hits the thermal limit.

The long answer is kind of complicated. Intel's guidance to laptop makers is basically "ride the thermal limit as hard as you can, if you don't you're leaving performance on the table". As I said the processor will take care of its own thermal situation, so for short batches of processing (basically everything the average user will do in a day) it's in everyone's best interest to let the processor hit whatever frequency it wants to get the work done as fast as possible. It's not going to saturate the heatsink in that amount of time, the fan probably won't even have to do much work.

You're in a different boat since rendering is a sustained workload. You saturate the heatsink to a great degree just while rendering pixels (the CPU has to do some work after the GPU compute stage), so when something like a denoising task comes along (heavily CPU bound) the added heat makes your temps go crazy. You're hitting the thermal limit of 100C (literally boiling), and the processor is backing off to compensate. It targets a steady state of 90-95C during sustained workloads, so the absolute high end that you're seeing is only the case for a short while.

But all of this is absolutely within spec for Intel, and it should be said that your laptop isn't weird. This happens a lot.

You can potentially look for some fan options or a "performance mode" in the power options on your laptop, oftentimes they will limit the fan speed for noise reasons.

Otherwise, if you are concerned there are ways to make render times longer.

Edit: This interview now exists, reinforcing my point and just generally interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9TjJviotnI

Allen Simpson
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