Windows Defender Scan Overheating CPU

Question

There are multiple entries for this same issue from back as far as 2017 but never an answer, just the normal canned questions and deflecting responses from Microsoft.. Why is this still a problem? Running my 4770K at 5GHz wit ha Noctua fan my cpu idles around 28-33 Celsius and when gaming it can reach has high as 50 Celius...MAYBE 52. If I kick off a full scan in Windows defender the CPU temp ramps up to 82 Celius and trips the shutdown threshold, BSDO and reboots. Why in the holy hell does this happen? This is obviously a flaw in Windows and not hardware. My bios is up-to-date, my system drivers are all up-to-date.

Answer 1

Hey Tom,

Though everything I've seen so far still reinforces what I stated in my earlier post, while responding to another post by someone simply worried that their processor was operating at 100% utilization (normal for Defender as I've at least inferred), I found something about Intel 5 GHz processors I didn't know.

Apparently, the way Intel gets their individual cores up to 5 GHz is via Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 where they step the speed up from base clock to maximum, all handled by the hardware and p-code. Supposedly the operating system already knows this feature and loads native support for the processor, but it does mention a particular Windows RS5 Edition or later, which I'm not certain is in the typical development path.

Overview of Intel® Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0

If it's an AMD processor rather than Intel I can't say, but I'd be making sure your operating system support and hardware all check out, since a BSOD virtually always means hardware failure of some sort.

Rob

Answer 2

Problems with overheating are always due to something within the computer itself, since it's up to the manufacturer to design an appropriate cooling system and as a device ages, it's likely that various portions of the cooling system will decay and eventually fail, so overheating is a common symptom that eventually causes older devices to fail.

A properly operating computer cooling system will not allow the device to reach excessively high temperatures, no matter what a single or multiple programs running on a device at once might be doing.

The reason that Windows Defender and really any antivirus app running scans is often involved when a system overheats is simple, they are some of the most efficiently designed and processor intensive apps that exist. Nearly all other apps are relatively inefficient and often spend (waste) most of their time waiting for the user to provide some sort of input, which means the processor is idling and thus it's impossible for it to overheat, which would be a common situation when playing games for example, which are typically more graphics intensive.

The problem is that other than people who've worked for computer manufacturers like me, almost no one understands these simple technical facts and thus they assume that 'programs cause overheating', when the truth is that 'badly designed, ineffectively configured, badly maintained (dust, aging cooling components) or simply old computer systems' eventually fail often due to overheating.

No one here needs to 'deflect for Microsoft', because none of us work for them, we're mostly either volunteer users or a few with Microsoft tags that are primarily contract workers. Those handful here with computer or engineering backgrounds like me are the only ones who truly have the technical backgrounds to fully understand what's happening, but quite a few others have learned from our posts and try to give their own short versions of what I just stated.

It doesn't really matter whether you choose to believe this or not, since any arbitrator or court would defer to technical experts even if you got that far and they'd say exactly the same things, so you're spitting into the wind complaining here or anywhere knowledgeable people exist.

So stop wasting time and find out why your device manufacturer didn't properly design your cooling system or why it's failing at this point. As a starting point, about 20 years ago the processor manufacturers (Intel and AMD at the time) stopped trying to make CPUs that operated above 4GHz because they always overheated, so they switched to multiple cores, speed-stepping and other technical tricks to allow processors running at slower speeds to simulate the performance of faster processors. For some reason though, they returned to operating a few processors at higher speeds again, likely due to improvements in specialized cooling system designs that allow this to some extent.

However, just like in the past when some 4Ghz systems started to fail, the attempt to run some of these systems flat out at these faster clock speeds is going to fail or overheat, especially as the systems age or when new designs aren't properly tested or misconfigured by those trying to operate them faster than they'll actually tolerate.

I can't say what your true problem is, only that's it's caused by your device specifics and not anything to do with any software running on the machine outside of the BIOS, which is the portion of the local software responsible for controlling power, temperature and speed-stepping functions to avoid thermal runaway. But if you change the Windows Power settings to a High-Performance mode and either the BIOS settings or cooling system design don't properly support this, it's likely the processor will overheat when any AV or other highly efficient applications are run.

Rob