Why do laptop temperatures spike 40C when I have Steam open?

[debian01]

Debian 12 (KDE Plasma 5.27)

Having Steam open causes my laptop to hit TJmax within a few seconds, is this normal on an old laptop? Clevo NP650SE w/ i7m CPU and a 970M GPU.

[bbbhltz]

I've never used Steam, but that seems within the range of normal. It is pretty visual and uses lots of libraries.

Is your device fanless? My wife's very recent laptop sounds like a tiltrotor aircraft when she opens any PDF or webpage because the ventilation is useless.

[None1975]

Hello.

I think this is normal. Steam is a heavy program that uses video card and CPU resources.

[wizard10000]

I think this is normal. Steam is a heavy program that uses video card and CPU resources.

Plus, the 4th gen i7 in that laptop tends to run a little toasty anyway. A little maintenance may be in order, such as blowing out dust and replacing thermal paste on the CPU but the machine's gonna run hot when you put a load on it. There's not enough space inside the laptop to adequately cool that CPU and you're probably not gonna be able to prevent it from throttling when you're gaming.

Best you can do is ensure heat transfer from CPU is optimized as best you can. I recently retired a 4th gen i7 laptop and even with clean fans and fresh thermal paste it'd start throttling when load approached 50%.

But - you're not gonna hurt the CPU. I've run that retired CPU against its thermal limiter for more than a week while handbraking a large video library,

Hope this explains a little -

[None1975]

Plus, the 4th gen i7 in that laptop tends to run a little toasty anyway.

Yes, I agree. I have a laptop with the same specifications and the normal temperature of the CPU is around 60 degrees. When working with heavy programs, the temperature rises to 75 degrees. I read somewhere that a temperature of 60-70 is normal for this type of processor.

[Uptorn]

Looking at the design of that laptop, having three fans, it seems the designers knew that the equipment would be getting rather hot.

[blackbird]

When I start steam on a Desktop with Ryzen 7 3700 and Ubuntu, it create a total CPU load of 25% till it's loaded. After it's loaded the CPU load isn't measurable at least with my eyes only. The GPU power consumption does not increase.
So if you only start Steam but no games I would expect the high temperature should decrease after it's fully loaded (as far as I understood you CPU temperature increases from 60°C to 100°C, so that would be too much for an idling Steam).