Very high GPU temps
 

Hi.

I've got an 2011 iMac, 3.4GHz i7, AMD Radeon HD 6970M. I've been running Windows 7 on it lately (64 bit) for some programming stuff and gaming purposes. The weather is rather hot here as of late (26°C) and I decided to check my GPU temperature while playng WoW because my fans sounded like they were spinning very fast.

This are the results:



As you can see, one die on the GPU shows 109.5°C. At one point, it was as high as 115. Now from what I know about graphics cards, this is insanely hot, as most people seem to consider 90°C to be overheating already.

The thing is, I'm not sure how accurate GPU-Z is. The fan speed readouts are wrong, for instance. The highest readout of GPU temperature I've ever had under OS X (using a different app to measure it, naturally) was 95°C, which caused the GPU to already throttle down, decreasing fps in order to cool down. I'm not sure if Windows does the same, though, and I'm worried it might be damaging my GPU.

Considering I've just taken it in for repairs on something different (screen brightness), and the repair guys assured me that they've tested it extensively, there's not supposed to be anything broken.

What should I do? Are these readouts possibly just wrong, and should I not worry?

I doubt they're wrong, first advice would be 'google it'.

See if it's a known issue with your gfx card and os/driver combo.

It does look to be quite high.

I've googled lots of related stuff before when I thought the temps were high on OS X already. There were few actually knowledgeable people and most just guessed what they considered to be reasonable temperatures. Out of the few people that game on Mac though I've not really seen anyone report such high temps.

The tech guys before called the 95 degrees on OS X 'normal' though. But since they won't support Windows, they can't answer me about questions related to it.

Try out speedfan and see what it's telling you for temps. I've been using it for quite a while and it's been pretty accurate. 109C is extremely hot for any gpu. I run a 6770 and 5770 crossfired and they never get anywhere near that hot even with the minimal room between the cards for air flow.

How old is your gpu?

Alot of times the silver compound on video cards/CPU's gets old and worn out. I often re-apply some every few months and temps always go down a good ammount.

Not saying this is your omg fix...but something to consider=)


**EDIT..well i fail at reading the third word of a post apparently...

From the original post:

Well I consider the IMac as a notebook... because everything is packed in a pretty slim and small environment. Considering the fact that you have warranty for it I would take it back to the retailer for some maintenance for some thermal conductiv repaste-ing. Things like notebooks and monitor pc's won't have that good cooling then a normal pc. If its still overheating try to google for some external coolers or homemade cooling system bacuse this summer will be freaking hot for a power pc like IMac.

Yeah... I'm not entirely sure those are completely accurate either... :p

That's about 12x as hot as the earth's core, give or take a few thousand.

I do have proper drivers for everything. Something's messing up the thermal unit though?

I think your GPU tries to melt through your table.

Having a mac I can tell you that absolutely it's worth your money to go in and have the damn thing cleaned inside and out at least once a year (if you can't do it yourself which with some of these models isn't very easy at all). It will save your fans lifetime and will keep your cpu cooler.
Macs unfortunately are great looking but the whole slim and compact design isn't great if you're going to use it as a gaming machine as keeping vents clean can get to be a nightmare.
All that being said, iMacs will run hot as a default though 89C is very very hot and at 90C my cpu is designed to shut down. You gotta take that in to get looked at before something fries.

Yeah I'm going to have to go ahead and say that the sensor might not be reading quite right lol