Be Careful with stockfish. It might kill your computer.

Hello. I bought a new computer system. It's many times more powerful than the laptop I was using before.
I'm using the i7 13700k, upgraded from an i3 7th gen, or something. Huge update. So far, the system handles normal computing tasks no problem.... until it encountered stock fish.

I went to use the analysis board, like I have many times with my laptop, and my tempts suddenly went from 25 degrees to 75 degrees, and my fans started screaming like a jet engine. I was like, wtf, that never happened with my laptop. However, I think my laptop simply didn't have a very powerful fan system, so it probably was heating up a lot, I just wasn't noticing it because I didn't monitor my laptop temps like I monitor my new system. The latptop was a lot quieter, so if the fan turned on, I hardly noticed and everything seemed fine.

Anyway, the settings that will raise your temps by far is, "threads". If I increase the thread count to only 8 out of 32 threads, the fans blast and temps instantly spike. It makes me not want to even use the engine. But if I keep threads down to 1 or 2, I can max out all the other settings, and it won't cause a great increase in temps.

I think "threads" are dangerous to unsuspecting users. To be honest, I started noticing problems with my previous laptop while using the chess engine. The monitor started glitching out, and then it came to the point where the computer was mostly unresponsive. When I took it in to the shop, they said my video card had melted due to overheating. Judging by the intense effect that this engine has on my 13th generation, i7, 2023 cpu, with 64gb of RAM, and a 240mm liquid cooling system. I hate to think what the engine was doing to my laptop, with an i3, 8th generation cpu and 8gb of ram. If I had to guess, I would guess that the chess engine probably melted my graphics card. Beware of threads in stockfish. I'd lower that stuff to 1 or 2, especially if you're using a laptop that might not have the best thermal throttling, and a weak little fan cooling system.

Has anyone out there actually maxed out the threads in stockfish? Does your system handle it ok? As far as I know, multiple threads means it will utilize more cores of your cpu. A lot of mid range laptops have maybe 4 or 8 threads. My cpu has 16 cores, 24 threads, but man, even just putting threads up to 8 really turns up the heat very fast. I am afraid of what would happen if I turned up all settings. With my previous laptop, I just noticed the computer goes slow when I turn up the settings, but I think I was overheating it without knowing.

i7 13700k has 8 performance cores with hyper-threading and 8 efficiency cores with just one thread. And yeah, if your 8 performance cores are going to be calculating stuff, they are going to generate quite a bit of heat. And chess engines are known to be CPU intensive tasks. Junction temperature is 100 degrees for i7 13700k, after that CPU is going to throttle to bring the temperature down, meaning it's going to calculate slower, bringing the performance down. So 75 degrees is not that bad.

If your hardware cannot handle Stockfish loading it, Stockfish is not the problem, your hardware is. Because then it's quite likely that any other task loading it fully, e.g. video encoding or building a larger project, would have exactly the same effect. I'm running SF16 40MB with 12 threads (on a 12-core Ryzen 5900X) and I can leave it running for 40 minutes without any hardware issues.

> When I took it in to the shop, they said my video card had melted due to overheating.
I'm not sure if SF engine can actually offload its calculation to GPU. I can imagine that the warm air from CPU cooler could result in GPU cooling not being able to handle its own heat but that would be a sign or really bad layout of the components.

Have you considered the possibility that it's NotePad.exe that melted your graphics card? They add new fonts and formatting features to it all the time. They should really be ashamed because some of us are stuck with RTX 4090s and cannot afford the enterprise level H100 and A100 superclusters required to run web browsers and plaintext editors in this day and age.

@mkubecek There is no problem with my hardware. My comment was a warning because I did start noticing problems with my previous system when using the engine, and now that I monitor my system, I saw big spikes in temperatures instantly. Just a warning to people, you might want to monitor your system with HWinfo, to make sure the intensive tasks aren't overheating components. Not that there is something in particular about the chess engine that melts computers, but I'm just saying, I did see big temperature spikes using it, and a previous overheated system, so from my pov, an unmonitored system can lead to problems.

@schlawg said in #4:
> Have you considered the possibility that it's NotePad.exe that melted your graphics card? They add new fonts and formatting features to it all the time. They should really be ashamed because some of us are stuck with RTX 4090s and cannot afford the enterprise level H100 and A100 superclusters required to run web browsers and plaintext editors in this day and age.

I guess you haven't heard. 4090's actually are overheating and melting. I would recommend precaution with those as well.

@SeaSkank said in #5:
> Not that there is something in particular about the chess engine that melts computers
And this was exactly my point: if Stockfish could make the hardware overheat to the point of damage, it's very likely that any other CPU intensive task would do the same. It was just a coincidence that Stockfish engine was the first you ran on that system.