I have BOINC running on my computer, CPU is a Pentium 4 3.0 gHz. Usually I don't use most of the CPU time, but when running BOINC it seems to take 100 %. This would be acceptable, since any other program I want to run at the same time as BOINC runs normally. However, my board temperature seems quite high, around 70-72 deg C. Is there a way to limit BOINC use to less than 100 % of the available CPU time/

Craig Miller

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Craig Miller

If it's a Hyperthreading CPU, you can cut usage by about 20%, by changing the preference "on multiprocessors, use at most" to 1 instead of 2 CPUs.

If it's not, then there is a utility called "Threadmaster", I believe it's on the "other software" links page, or you can google it.

70C sounds very high to me; high enough that I would be looking for the real problem, rather than trying to just not aggravate it. I would clean out all the dust, check all the fans, and possibly replace the thermal paste or the whole CPU heat sink/fan assembly. Even at 100%, my AMD 64 3700+ runs at 47C, while it idles at 43C. P4's run hotter than that, but...

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I have a P4 3.0 was running 73c last summer, took old Intel heat sink fan assemb off, put new grease and a volcano 7 fan heat sink on and my temps dropped to 46c at 100%

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BOINC Wiki

Thanks for your suggestions. I'm not a computer expert, but following the instructions in the manual which came with my computer I opened the case and cleaned out dust. The dirt buildup seemed greatest on the cooling assembly on the CPU. I cleaned this out as best I could. My peak temperatures with BOINC running are now in the 50-55 deg C range!

Thanks again for your most helpful replies.

Craig

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Craig Miller

I have a Titanium PowerBook G4 that I just gave up using BOINC on for this reason. The laptop would run at 100% and would start trying to fry my legs, and the poor fan wasn't used to running all the time and started to sound like it was going to fail. There's not a lot I can do to fix the running temperature (it's endemic to the Titanium line) shy of limiting the CPU utilization.

Unfortunately, Threadmaster seems to be a Windows-only solution. Any Mac solutions out there?

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Another success story here:

I have a laptop - HP Compaq nw8000 - with Pentium M CPU @ 2GHz. It started to heat up after approximately 9 months. Normal CPU temperature used to be about 60 deg C, but then started to raise until it peaked 95 deg C where CPU's thermal throttling kicked in. After everything got thoroughly cleaned, CPU temperature dropped to healthy 55-60 deg C.

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Metod ...