IdealCPU is supported by its readers. If you buy products through links on our site, we may earn a commission. Learn more

Ideal Temperature Range for CPU While Gaming on PC

A few years back gaming didn’t affect your processor as much as it does today. A dual-core CPU along with a decent graphics card was enough to play your favorite games on your computer. However, the PC gaming industry has evolved in the past few years, and now we see games that need more CPU cores for a better gaming experience.

Having more CPU core means more heat generation. And if you really don’t take care of that heat, you might end up frying your CPU. So in this article, we will discuss the optimal CPU temperatures while gaming on your PC.

If you are a hardcore gamer, you have to make sure that your CPU is not overheating. So you must know what is the optimum temperature range of a CPU while you are playing games on it. According to many professional gamers, your CPU temps should not exceed 80°C. However, if you have overclocked your CPU, temperatures may exceed a little bit more over this point.

Temperature Range for CPU While Gaming

How to Maintain Your CPU Temperature While Gaming?

There are many ways to keep your CPU temperature optimal. If you just want to keep an eye on your CPU temps, you can do that by install some reliable CPU temperature monitoring software or by heading into your BIOS. CPU temperature management software gives you deep insights into your CPU.

See also  What is AMD Equivalent to Intel Core i7?

You can also use Intel Extreme Tuning Utility and Ryzen Master Utility for Intel and AMD CPUs to keep an eye on temperature statistics.

And if your concern is to keep those temps as low as possible, then you can follow these steps.

Clean Your CPU Fans

The dust particles around your CPU fan absorb a lot of heat. This is one of the main reasons of high CPU temperatures. I always clean my CPU fans once in a month to get rid of dust. You can clean CPU fans with a microfiber cloth.

Install a New CPU Cooler

In many cases, your stock CPU cooler isn’t good enough to handle rising temperatures. If you have ever used an Intel stock cooler in your gaming rig, you will understand what I’m saying at this point. This is where I will praise AMD for putting their full efforts into improving their stock cooler design. Well, if you are using an AMD CPU cooler, you really don’t need an aftermarket cooler to handle high temps unless you are overclocking your CPU.

An affordable aftermarket CPU cooler is good enough to keep temperature under 80°C while gaming. But if your CPU has more than 8 cores, and you overclock your CPU to its maximum potential for hardcore gaming, I recommend you to go with a liquid cooling kit. A water cooling kit is a more reliable option for keeping those high CPU temperatures as low as possible.

See also  Is 7ms Response Time Good for Gaming? (It Depends!)

Final Lines

So I hope you’ve got the answer to your question regarding the temperature range of a CPU while gaming. You can install CPU monitoring software to get more insights in this case. And you can do little tweaks like cleaning your CPU fans or installing a new CPU cooler to keep your CPU temperature at an ideal range. If you have any tips to share with our community, leave it in the comment section below.

IdealCPU is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. Many or all of the products featured here are from Amazon or our partners who compensate us. If you grab anything we mention using our referral links, we may get a small commission. However, there's no extra cost for you.