Hi Gavin,
I have also been pleasantly surprised by Qwen 3.8. I run it on my MBP and on an Asus Ascent with nVidia GB10 chipset. Both get hot… I think the Asus even shut down once because of the heat, although I couldn’t find any evidence in the logs. I have since moved it to a cooler place and put it on a couple of aluminium Ikea shelf supports to improve the airflow from below.
From what I know the nVidia chips will throttle the GPU to stay below critical temperatures. That also implies the GPU will always maximise speed until it gets to the “orange zone”, with occasional 80+ values, before it slows down. So what you describe is probably normal. I don’t see any throttling happening on the GB10. I have no idea if running at constant high temperature will decrease life expectancy, but feeling the heat come out the back of your machine and hearing the fans struggling at max RPM is not exactly comforting . I tried a couple of other things: pointing a desk fan at it and putting a small and very flat pan full of ice on top (I know: electricity and water don’t mix). Neither of those things made much difference to the operating temperature. Have you tried running your system with the case open?