90C is fine, more important is the core speed and if it's throttling heavily which will impact performance.
If it's been several years it's also possible the thermal paste is not working as well anymore and needs to be replaced.
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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Certain workloads can't just magically cause your CPU to get "unusually" hot. It's true that some instruction sets can cause greater thermal loads than others, but disabling the relevant instruction sets is only likely to make it worse, as the CPU will then complete the work using other less efficient instructions.
A CPU will run as hot as it needs to to do whatever it is doing, up to whatever its safe temperature is, at which point it will slow down to protect itself. Running at this "max" temp is not a problem. CPUs will run as fast and hot as they safely can, and no hotter.
Presumably the emulated games are simply framerate and resolution limited, where the normal PC games may not be.
That said, there are some things you can do, assuming the CPU doesn't actually need to work as hard as it is to run the games you are playing.
- Limit framerate. The game may be running uncapped, in which case it will be using 100% GPU (and therefore more CPU as well) to create as many frames as possible. The ones in excess of your display refresh rate will simply not be shown. You can usually limit framerate in game settings (often called vsync). If this isn't available, it can be done using mangohud.
- Limit power and/or clock speed. This will lower power consumption and temperatures, at the cost of performance. Which is not a problem if the game doesn't actually need to run that fast.
- Lower the "max" allowed temperature. This will cause the CPU to throttle sooner, keeping it cooler. This usually has a severely negative impact on performance.
You might also look into undervolting the system. This involves lowering the voltage used by the CPU. This can allow it to run cooler without sacrificing performance, but can cause system instability.
Using battery saver disables turbo boost, so it never goes to 3Ghz, which means it doesnt go to 90c that quickly anymore. Thanks for making me remember battery saver exists!
They talked about Turbo Boost. Disabling it on my machine has been such a drastic game changer that the CPU actually runs better without it and the system is smoother under heavy workloads.
Disabling Turbo Boost falls under limiting power/clock speed.
Turbo Boost is just a dynamic overclock, as such, disabling it is essentially an underclock. It can indeed result in a smoother experience by virtue of reducing thermal throttling. Thermal limits can reduce clocks much more drastically while waiting for the CPU to cool, than running it at lower but not-as-hot clockrate to begin with.
This is especially true for for weaker cooling systems that take longer to get the temps back down when the CPU hits max, meaning it can take a second before the CPU is back to normal speed. An underclock in such a case is beneficial.
One thing worth looking into is if your thermal paste needs replacing.
I see you've got an 8145U, that's old enough that it might need re-pasting. Laptops generally have terrible thermals to start with, so if the paste goes bad you'll often see them start to thermally throttle on fairly light workloads (like Deltarune).
Another thing worth considering would be to turn on thermald to better control your temps.
86c is fine. Especially with laptops the bios will not spin up your fan much when it doesn't need to. You could check if there are other fan profiles in bios or override them with fan control software.
God damn it kris where the hell are we.