Operating Temperature Changes in 10.6.7??

At first I thought they may have improved - as yesterday I was running around 90-100 F just doing light operations. Today - I'm wondering what's going on. I'm doing what I spend my weekends doing - research - and just happened to glance at the Menu bar and noticed I was up to 171 F.

I haven't really been concerned about operating temps - in spite of the myriad of threads on the topic - mine have been nothing abnormal or concerning. However, as I'm doing nothing different or computationally intensive - I was a little shocked to see the temps that high.

I have GFX keeping the Intel card engaged - but I'm definitely running significantly warmer today for some reason. Anyone else observing this?

Note: I have March 2011 15" 2.3 GHz MBP with 8G RAM

 

Thanks. Just added my $0.02 there.