Quote Originally Posted by unclewebb View Post
A colored graph based on Distance to TjMax is a good idea in theory but even here there's a problem. The core voltage you are running and how much you are overclocking directly effects the stability of your computer at a given temperature.

My E6400 with a TjMax=85C is a good example. It is Prime/Orthos stable at:

3200 MHz - DTS = 5
3400 MHz - DTS = 15
3600 MHz - DTS = 25

The amount of head room a person has to leave to maintain stability varies with how hard they are pushing their processor. For my E6400, even when it is overclocked by 50%, it remains Orthos stable right up to the thermal throttling point just before TjMax.



Orthos and CoreTemp misreport MHz so ignore them. TAT shows the thermal throttle was Active (aka. rev limiter ) yet Orthos continued to run without any problems and CPU-Z correctly reports that the CPU is still running at full speed. You need higher temps than this before the thermal throttle will drop the multi down to 6.0 and real throttling begins.

When running this same CPU at 3600 MHz, I can't get anywhere near this temperature while running Orthos without randomly rebooting or losing stability.

A colored bar graph is not going to solve anything. How can I tell a user in the above example that is running their E6400 at 3200MHz and their DTS=25 that they are near the "red zone". That will only scare a person from pushing farther even though they still have a huge amount of temperature head room and are well within the Intel spec. Like wise, how can I tell a person at 3600MHz that DTS=25 is a nice safe number when they have trouble running Orthos for any length of time whenever the room temperature goes up by 1C.

People are getting far too hung up on absolute temperatures and even Distance to TjMax. As long as you leave yourself some head room to TjMax so your processor isn't throttling and you're Prime stable, then there isn't any need to even monitor core temperatures. If Intel thought that your processor was going to blow up at high temperatures near TjMax then obviously they would lower TjMax to avoid warranty claims. Instead, Intel has raised TjMax by 10C for the new 45nm dual cores which to me is a pretty good sign that core temperature just isn't that big of an issue.
You bring up some good points, but I was thinking of a much simpler concept. The colours would in no way be an indication of stability (stability needs to be proven using recognised tools like Prime95 and Memtest), but purely represent distance from tjmax. In fact, your last paragraph pretty much sums up the idea behind this concept.

We could choose arbitrary constant values from tjmax to determine colour. For example, 20C below tjmax could be the start of the red zone, and 45C below tjmax could be the start of the yellow zone. These values could even be configurable (.ini file). By also showing the actual distance from tjmax (a coloured gauge may not be precise enough for people to make informed decisions), each individual can choose whether to push their system further. For new overclockers asking 'what's a safe temp' or 'are my temps ok?', the colour-coding should make things much simpler by providing an indication as to what's considered safe. Those with more experience may well want to push things closer to the limit and can therefore configure the values.

This should also fit with Intel increasing/decreasing the tjmax values for their processors. If Intel were to raise tjmax, it should be an indication that the processor can run hotter. The colour zones should therefore still be relevant.

I just like this idea as a concept, although this is a very simplistic design. Whether it's wise to use a constant value like '20C from tjmax = red' for processors with varying tjmax values is debatable. In fact, there may be the same level of discussion around these values as there are about the real tjmax values for each processor family .

I'm not proposing that you should consider changing the overall design of Real Temp. The results of your investigations are extremely useful, and I still think there will be a lot of demand for programs that attempt to report absolute temps for processors. In fact, I would expect a lot more resistance to a new concept like this as most people seem to have this need to know absolute values. I do see a lot of value in this concept though, and if my programming skills were not quite so limited I would like to attempt such a program myself.