Safe/max temperatures for motherboard

Motherboard is Z170 Gaming-ITX/ac.

What are the safe temperature readings for the motherboard and PCH?

Im getting readings from hwinfo.


Edited by x6phenom - 02 Feb 2016 at 5:56pm

I rarely give simple answers to questions about PCs, because PCs are simply not... uhm, simple.

The Intel chipsets in general have a surprisingly wide range of operating temperatures, with a maximum temperature at automatic shutdown that is greater than the processors of the same generation.

The rated maximum TDP of the Z170 chipset is 6 Watts. That is not much heat that needs to be dissipated.

The heatsink used for the chipset, the voltage into the chipset, the cooling potential of the PC case, and the load on the chipset all affect the temperature reading you'll get from a monitoring program like HWiNFO. That is what I use.

Intel is vague about the maximum temperature that is considered "catastrophic", meaning the shutdown temperature. That is because each chipset is individually programmed with that temperature, just as processors. In reality, the difference between examples of each chip is rarely if ever different.

The temperature sensor's accuracy is different at different temperatures, which is why one specific temperature is not given. The accuracy range is +/- 10% from -10C to 30C, +/- 7% from 30C to 50C, and +/- 5% from 50C to 110C. The temperature sensors data is a value between 0C and 128C.

So I will say the maximum temperature of the Z170 is ~110C.

My Z170 chipset in my Z170 Extreme7+ board is right now at... 44.0 C. I've seen it as high as the low 50's C. I would consider improving cooling to the chipset if it reached ~60C.

What is "safe" is a personal decision IMO, and depends upon the chipset, and the other criteria I mentioned above. My personal safe temperature is stated above. The older X58 chipset was rarely seen below 60C. The Z87 and Z97 on my boards are always below 40C.

I have my Z170 loaded down with three PCIe SSDs, so every DMI3 (PCIe 3.0) lane is being used.

Mother board temperature is a completely different thing. ALL the mother board manufactures have provided us with a single "mother board temperature" for many years.

What does the mother board temperature mean? Where is it being measured on the board? How can one mother board temperature sensor possibly provide information that is useful about the temperature of all the various components used on a board? What about heat produced by other components like video cards, does that affect mother board temperature?

A few boards like the ASRock OC Formula series have multiple temperature sensors that are distributed across the board. That gives us a much better idea of how good our cooling of the PC really is.

You can tell that I don't think much of a single mother board temperature, since what is being measured is so ambiguous.

The best answer about a safe single mother board temperature is as low as possible. I make cooling of my PCs as a priority. My mother board temperature currently is 24C. It's winter where I live now, so that temperature will be higher in the summer. I have rarely seen a mother board temperature above 30C for any PC I built. If I saw a mother board temperature of ~40C, I would begin wondering how I could reduce it.