Cheap game PC upgrade for my son (is the AMD A10 becoming to hot?)

After upgrading my sons PC (see my previous blog entry) with a AMD A10-7800 processor and a AsRock FM2+ motherboard we downloaded the Steam client and played two games: Left4Dead and Kingdom Rush. Especially during Left4Dead the temperature of the computer case felt uncomfortably high but we didn't know how high. I do know however that AMD CPU's in general tend to become hotter that the Intel competitors and was a bit worried. We therefore installed Psensor to monitor the CPU and motherboard temperature. During Left4Dead the CPU temperature rose to 63 degrees Celsius which left us with the question: is this too high?

I decided to turn to the PC Gaming community on Google+ with this question.  As it happens this community proved very helpful and according to them 63 is nothing to worry about. The critical temperature is 74 degrees Celsius. To be on the save side we installed an additional case fan. Finally we ran a test with a Linux program called Stress. Stress is a simple workload generator and maxes out the CPU to 100%. During the test the temperature rose to 66 degrees Celsius which is, again according to the PC Gaming community, acceptable. Happy with this result we decided to stop tinkering and start gaming.

stress running on our AMD A10-7800 with Ubuntu 14.04LTS. The CPU's are at 100% while the temperature didn't go beyond 66 degrees Celsius.