Heat is a major problem for electronic devices, especially in the Summer months. Overheating may lead to a whole range of issues, including crashes or reduced performance.
To combat this, PC users have discovered thousands of solutions. From pointing a fan at the PC during the hottest hours to liquid cooling systems or reducing the voltage and frequency of core components such as the processor.
Camomile is a free app that promises to do the latter. It reduces voltage and frequency of the processor to bring down its temperature. I took the app for a test and it surely dropped the temp from 43 degrees Celsius to 36 degrees Celsius in a matter of minutes.
The app displays the current temperature in its interface. I ran several other temperature apps beside it to check the accuracy, and it was good.
This comes with a bit of a trade-off, as it works similarly to energy-saving techniques. In short, performance may drop slightly when the app is doing its work.
Still, if you are in a dire situation, with CPU temps reaching much higher degrees than I experienced, then you may not mind as much.
Lowering has additional positive effects, including:
- It may extend battery life.
- It may reduce the fan noise.
Wayne mentioned the app over on Betanews. Some users reported that Malwarebytes was flagging it as a PUP. Similarly, Dr.Web and CrowdStrike Falcon are flagging the software as well. I did not notice any issues during installation of afterwards.
It does not offer much in terms of functionality. You can enable cooling mode and disable it. Other than that, it displays a temperature graph and temperature information for other components.
Closing Words
There are numerous ways to cool down PC components, especially in the Summer months. Sometimes, all that is needed is to get rid of the pesky dust to get the fans operating at full capacity again.
At other times, you could consider installing more fans or fans that are more powerful than what you have currently. While water-based cooling solutions are cool, they also require a level of expertise that many PC users shy away from.
An app like Camomile may also be sufficient. Surely, you may also use different tools for the same purpose. With that said, Camomile is easy to use and it certainly does reduce the temperature of the processor by a few degrees when run.
What about you? How do you fight heat in Summer to keep your PCs and devices going?
My desktop PC AMD Ryzen 9 3900X is running at 43 degrees, I don’t see that as a problem at all. Oh CrowdStrike Falcon are flagging this? Maybe that company should keep a low profile for a bit now..
I had to test this.. Surely enough it dropped my temperature down to 41 degrees. Completely useless. As a sidenote, it shows a red background on your temperature when it’s not running, but as soon as you turn it on it turns to a blue soothing and reassuring color..even when the temperature PLUMMETS two-three degrees. Uninstalling, but an experience richer.
Modern PC hardware will throttle itself automatically to prevent damage from high temperatures, you don’t need to be messing with it.
As for your question, we are fortunate enough to own a newer home with good insulation and central HVAC. We keep the automatic thermostat set at 72-77 all year.
For those not as fortunate, simply aiming a fan at the pc to feed it cooler air and push the exhaust away will help both the PC and you keep cool.
The easiest way to decrease CPU temperature is to disable or minimize overclocking. In return, however, you will not get extra processing power in a pinch.
I think computers run hot these days because of AI which needs so much more processing power to operate. That and the fact that since the advertising industry funds the Internet more or less, the proliferation of adservers drawing processing power as they download ads from servers scattered all over the Web contributes to overheating issues on machines, especially those that don’t have the equipment to handle the additional load.
Apps like the one in the article help a bit, but main problem is addressing the cause of the heating issues in the first place. I note in an article I read somewhere yesterday that the next PCs will require the 16GB RAM and an NPU minimum to run AI / Copilot and all the other junk Microsoft is coming up with without which we’ll all find ourselves out in the cold. But why do we need that all that stuff? To run ads of course! As if we’ll all go stark, staring bonkers if we don’t see an ad every day of our lives.
Not a bad program for cooling; I was using Speed Fan, but Camomile cooled much faster and better–talking about 5-7 degrees cooler without noticing much effect on performance. Thank you very much.
Why isn’t Geek Installer developing much anymore? Maybe a better option someone?