CPU Heat: Non-Issue or Issue?

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emrak

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Feb 17, 2014
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So I'm giving my son my old PC and did all the standard hand-me-down stuff: cleaned out the interior, formatted drives, reinstalled Windows (unrelated note...experimented with Windows 8.1 and love it! I understand 8.0 was tha suk but I'm really impressed by 8.1), and of course, replaced the stock cooler with a brand new stock cooler because they're cheap, so why not. Also using coffee filters, Silver Arctic 5 thermal goo, and associated Silver Arctic cleaner to remove the old/stock thermal compound. Updated the BIOS. Good times.

So, I'm not a n00b. That said...I feel like one. Here's why. Check out this HWMonitor screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/9WWsEiq.png Those CPU temps seem reasonable for a new goo'ing. I know there's a burn in time and temps can drop 1-5 degrees over time.

HOWEVER...when I go into the BIOS it is showing CPU temps of 75c-85c. I could understand a slight temp differential but this difference between the BIOS and HWMonitor seems a little extreme.

Thoughts?

P.S.--this PC has never had any component overclocked.
 
Solution
Novuake
No, don't do that. These CPUs are perfectly safe up to 103C.

I usually insist that it stays under 90C.

Sop you really do not have to worry.
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Novuake

Novuake

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Aug 27, 2011
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People have a bad habit of wanting to blame stuff on faulty components. :)

Thermometers in AMD system used to be a problem in BIOS because they did not read temps under 40C very accurately. ONce you put load on they became accurate again. One big reason why BIOSes automatically load the CPU.
 
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calummarks

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Jan 6, 2014
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Thanks :) so would you say 40-50c in bios without os is good or bad? this is happening to my friend
 
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emrak

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Feb 17, 2014
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I have never heard that about the BIOS. I have always heard it used minimal CPU (or none at all). If so, then that makes sense. Yes, the HWMonitor is at idle. Also, when I run the same comparison on the other two PCs in the house, they're all in the ballpark of each other at least. Nothing like the vast differential on the rebuilt box.
 
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emrak

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Feb 17, 2014
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It is an MSI P67A-G45 mobo. The BIOS is from April 14, 2011. The CPU is a quad-core Intel i5 2500. Does this sound like a (groan) remove-regoo-reseat operation?
 
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emrak

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Feb 17, 2014
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I would be cool with that (get it? "cool" with that lol i kill me), but do you have any guesses as to why BIOS temp is sitting at 85c and HWMonitor temps are sitting under 35c? If there are no software issues, then there must be a hardware issue.
 
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emrak

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Feb 17, 2014
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Thanks for your input Novuake. The notion that a simple BIOS would be generating such overhead seemed odd to me, so I dug into this for more details. For future searchers, here's why Novuake is right. First and foremost, Windows has a bevy of utilities, both integrated and 3rd Party, which will adjust CPU usage based on current demand. Many BIOS do not utilize such features, so they're always running the CPU at full throttle (while conversely the OS puts the CPU in a low-power sleep state between interrupts). Secondly, most CPUs are multicore, however most BIOS only utilize a single core. These BIOS will run a busy loop on core #0. Conversely, Windows will typically distribute load across all the cores. Hence, BIOS temperatures are effectively full-load single core while the OS is multicore and "true" idle.

Tl;dr: believe Windows CPU temp monitors, not the BIOS temp monitor.
 
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