I haven't Owned a Laptop since the 90s...

[JofaMang]

... and I picked up a new gateway in a trade with a friend for some car parts. Fresh out the package with windows 7 home premium 64 bit preloaded.
Athlon II x2 m320 45nm 35w TDP
Gateway 785g w/ HD4200 IGP
4gb 800mhz DDR2
500gb HDD
1366x768 screen

I let the gateway autoinstalls do their thing, then go about removing the bloatware. Seems like a pretty crisp machine, better than I expected of a laptop for sure, though I am out of the loop on those in general. Anyhow, I install coretemp (as I do on all my machines) and since my most common reference point temperature-wise is my desktop, I am fairly shocked at the temperatures of the CPU. With the laptop on a flat tabletop in a rather cool room (about 19c ambient) it is idling at 48c, and hitting 62c often in the normal run of things (opening firefox for example). Using a ventilated laptop stand type thing, the temps only dropped a degree or two.

I have had some trouble finding out more about these CPUs, to know for myself if this is a normal laptop operating temp or perhaps something is amiss with the cooling.

Also, my battery life, with all power saving features enabled, is no more than 90minutes. Is this normal for this type of laptop? The original owner bought 2 full years of warranty on it through the store he bought it from, and it transferred to me, so I guess i want to know if things are the way they are supposed to be before I take it in. I don't trust the staff working there very much, heh, and would like to go in armed with a bit of information.

 

[buwish]

From what I can tell, these chips tend to run a bit hot, at least in comparison to intel chips of the same generation. I couldn't find any specifics, but I would assume that the tjuntion max is somewhere between 90-100C, like most laptop CPU's. So long as it doesn't get near 90C, I'd say you'll be fine. But it is something to keep an eye on in the future.

 

[JofaMang]

Ok, thats good news. All I know of Athlon II chips is the desktop variants, which have a much lower temp threshold afaik. I might give gateway tech support a call/email just to see what they have to say, to be on the safe side.

I can usually dig up specs on hardware one way or another, but this chip is too new to have a lot of info out there just yet.

 

[JofaMang]

Best answer selected by JofaMang.