gaming laptop for computer idiot

[michaelgim]

ah yes. during gaming the cpu is not as stressed as the gpu
55 degC cpu during gaming is very good

next step is to do a cpu intensive activity eg encode some video clip for 5min. that, is where the crux is, and that is where my original though is i.e. during a pure or mainly cpu intensive task, the temperature will find it hard to stay below 80degC. no offence of course, just curious in real world data for confirmation as good info sharing thats all =)

dont do any video encoding... so sorry no numbers to help you... although I have numbers of desktop virtualization, running 3 VMs concurrently, which I think is closer to the numbers you are looking for:

CPU (4 cores): 65 +/-3 deg
GPU: 50 +/- 1 deg

The temp indicated was the average as I saw the temp went as high as 80 deg when I was booting up the VMs, which also saw the CPU utilization went up to 100%. So you can safely say that the temp should not exceed 80 deg, which I suspect the CPU will throttle back the core speed to bring down the temp.