I decided to see how the temperatures were while playing UT3, so I downloaded Speedfan. I ran UT3 in windowed mode and just sitting idle on the main menu, Core 0 and Core 1 both had the flame icon and were between 55 and 57 degrees Celsius. Before I started, HD0 had a green check, Temp1-3 had a blue arrow, and both of the cores had green checks.

When I opened up Firefox, both Cores got the flame emblem and went up to around 49 or 50. Then, once Firefox loaded, the temperature went back down and a blue arrow was there. Is that normal for hardware to do that? Whats a dangerous temperature that could possibly effect the part? Is >60C a warm enough temperature where if I still play UT3 for a few hours, nothing will be affected? I've noticed that UT3 uses between 65 to 100% of my dual-core processor, so I may have to wait until they update it for multi-cores to take a little pressure off my processor.

Currently, everything has a blue check except the HD0, which has a green arrow. The temperatures range from 27C to 41C, with the latter being the HD0.

What processor do you have, and what cooler do you have on it? Yeah, above 60 Celsius seems to be the upper limit, above that, and you need a better cooler.

AJ

Intel Core 2 Duo T9550 2.66GHz in a laptop. I don't know the cooler.

I found out that my processor can work up to 150 degrees Celsius. I found it online and an Intel chat-support person gave me a link to the same information on their website.

It wasn't until after I left the chat that I was curious to see the degrees in Fahrenheit and, well, it's 302 degrees Fahrenheit. I know that the processor would probably never get up to 150C, but I can't see how all that heat is good for the hardware around it. Do processors contain the heat or something? I'm super paranoid about this computer. I have to keep it running smoothly for 4 years, at least, especially since it came with a $2,000+ price tag...

All laptops get a little hot when your doing stuff like playing games and encoding video.
It should be fine.

what's your Onboard Video on that Notebook? again, Notebooks get warm/hot no matter what you are doing.