Over the past couple days, the hottest tablet-related news has not been about Apple’s New iPad’s sales figures, nor has it been about its competition. But it is indeed a piece of hot news, as everybody seems to be talking about the New iPad – and its unfortunate tendency to overheat.

Complaints about Apple’s third-generation tablet computer overheating have snowballed in the past few days, as many unsatisfied users took to Apple’s support forum to share their situations. Apple has since denied that such an overheat issue exists, but a few benchmark testers remained undeterred and still went ahead and published their test results on the New iPad.

Dutch tech site Tweakers.net was one of them, as they had recently performed GLBenchmark tests on both the New iPad and its predecessor, the iPad 2. As per Tweakers’ test results, the iPad 2 can reach peak temperatures of 28.3 degrees Celsius. The New iPad, on the other hand, tested at a torrid 33.6 degrees Celsius peak temperature.

However, Tweakers did give a bit of credence to Apple’s claim that there is no such overheating problem on the New iPad. They mentioned that the New iPad runs on an operating temperature range of zero to 35 degrees Celsius.

This leads us to two possibilities as to why the tablet overheats like it does. First would be the new dual-core A5X chip, which features a quad-core GPU. Second would be the device’s larger battery.

Could this be the price New iPad users have to pay for all the enhanced features available?

We certainly hope not, as nobody wants to deal with a tablet that overheats every other time you use it.