Why is CPU Temperature so Important?
When the first affordable PCs were offered to the general public in the early 80's, system engineers and designers took in consideration what heat was emitted by system components and ensured their case and cooling designs handled the appropriate amount of heat so system damage or instability was rarely an issue. These PCs were not very configurable, and could not easily be modified or customized by the end user, except for memory limits and number of floppy storage devices. Most peripherals were external, so they didn't really add heat issues to the base system, and those that were internal were low power, and low bandwidth technologies. This was acceptable to the public at the time, because people didn't have the basic knowledge and skill sets required to customize or modify their PCs.
During the 90's when there were many huge advances in microprocessor, bus, and solid state electronics as a whole, the original offerings were altered. More vendors were offering peripherals and computer components tailored to specific user needs and requirements, the system manufacturers started to recognize that there was a significant market in aftermarket sales of specialized peripherals, and the technology to produce smaller and faster processing solid state electronic components really took off. More system capabilities were integrated into the system motherboard without increasing its size, including high fidelity sound, high speed I/O buses and memory buses, as well as new technologies like DMA transfers and shared memory systems. New advances in operating systems that were multi-user and multi-processing started to be available for the desktop PC market. Systems were becoming more capable, and more customizable as time went on. Unfortunately, there was a price, additional cooling was required to keep the system stable. As larger power supplies were installed to handle the additional components, and solid state circuitry got smaller and smaller, the heat output from major and even minor components was increasing significantly. At the same time, users wanted smaller and smaller cases to recover some of their desk and floor space.
In the late 90's, the temperature bubble burst. New high performance components were becoming more and more simple to integrate into an existing system, the vendors producing motherboards were creating more flexible designs allowing users to add more capabilities without buying a new system, and the biggest change of all, high quality graphics capabilities were coming onto the market. Users were really customizing their PCs to a great extent, modifying the system to meet their specific goals and needs, where only the hard core users would even consider doing this in the past. Heat was increasing by leaps and bounds in these systems.
What is Overclocking and Overvolting
Overclocking is the process of turning up the processor clock or multiplier value of a processor unit on the motherboard, attempting to get the highest possible clock and multiplier value without compromising system stability. Modern processors are often multiplier locked, preventing a user from just changing the bus multiplier and introducing negligible additional heat to the system. Only the actual processor clock value can be changed on these CPUs, generally having a wider effect on system heat and stability.
Overvolting is a necessary evil for modern processors, and is generally used to attempt to stabilize an overclocked processor that is proving to be unstable. The voltage tolerances for microprocessors today are reasonably wide, around 10% or more. Increasing the voltage values gives the processor more juice to ensure that its logic gates are handling decisions reliably. A significant side effect of overvolting is heat emission.
Overclocking and Overvolting your systems can have negative effects on the life span of your system, so be sure you know what you are doing when you attempt them. Attempting to overclock and overvolt your system also has a chance of permanently damaging your hardware.
Conclusion
Modern users want to control and customize their systems to a greater degree today than ever before. Because of this, monitoring your systems sensor resources is critical for helping make what was previously a tedious, time consuming and technically challenging possible for the every day user...
more at: http://www.tech-faq.com/monitor-cpu-temperature.shtml
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