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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

From what I've read, it's stable at ~92°C.[0]

That seems damn high to me, but then I'm most familiar with desktops and servers, where you can cool far more aggressively. So is long term ~92°C hard on CPUs?

0) https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-macbook-pro-speed-throttling...

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My old MacBook Pro I had for more than 5 years is 90% of the time around 100C. Whenever I'm working or playing. It's still working good.

That's a ridiculous temperature. That is literally the thermal limit for all recent Intel CPUs - they throttle to avoid actual damage at that point. No computer, not even a thin laptop, should be hitting that temperature or anything close to it.

Wow, I've just found https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupportgore/comments/4917wn/ano... but in a different context

100C is the boiling point of water.

I hope there is no water whatsoever in your chips.

Does liquid cooling count

That's not in the chips. The liquid in a cooling loop doesn't get to the temperature of the actual die if it did it wouldn't actually be cooling the die any more. Also the temp reading are down in the die itself and there's a gradient between the die -> heatspreader -> cooling block (air or water) -> 'cooling medium' (ie air/water).

So what? What's the boiling point of water got to do with anything? Is your CPU made of water?

No but your lap is (mostly)

When people say the ‘CPU’ in this thread, they don’t mean the whole main computer unit, if that’s what you’re thinking. They mean just the little chip inside. There’s a cooling system so it isn’t actually anywhere near that hot on your lap.

True. But I've used laptops where the fan exhaust was unbearably hot. And I'm sure that was much cooler than 90°C.

So maybe someone could check exhaust temperature on a 2018 Macbook Pro with i7 under heavy load. I get that the exhaust ports are on the back, near the display hinge. But that still might be iffy, for those who cross their legs.

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