Athlon 860k Stock Cooler Temps Are Unusually High

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hyperthreadedm

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Hello everyone. i am having some trouble with my stock air cooler.

I have an AMD Athlon X4 860k, non overclocked on the stock air configuration. It seems my temperatures on IDLE are hovering around the 95° Celsius range. Woah.

Is this normal? I used to own a 7850k and on the stock cooler it sat around 40°C on idle, but my Athlon came with the same exact cooler and is waaaaay hotter.

I have a 200mm intake fan and a 140mm exhaust fan for airflow in a Phanteks Enthoo Evolv ITX case, so I don't think airflow is a problem. I have reseated the cooler 2 times and applied fresh blobs of Arctic Ceramique 2 paste, and no improvement. Hope someone can help me out! Thanks.
 
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clutchc
No, that is not normal. In fact, it is dangerously high. If you are sure the cooler/thermal paste is done correctly and the cooler is attached correctly, I would be considering that the fan on the cooler is not spinning as fast as it should. Or possibly not at all.

Just to double check your core temp readings, run AMD Overdrive and watch thermal margins at idle. Thermal margin is kind of the opposite of core temps. The hotter the core temp, the lower the thermal margin. If you are idling at 90C-ish or more, you should be in the negative readings in thermal margin.
http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-technologies/technologies-gaming/over-drive
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clutchc

clutchc

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No, that is not normal. In fact, it is dangerously high. If you are sure the cooler/thermal paste is done correctly and the cooler is attached correctly, I would be considering that the fan on the cooler is not spinning as fast as it should. Or possibly not at all.

Just to double check your core temp readings, run AMD Overdrive and watch thermal margins at idle. Thermal margin is kind of the opposite of core temps. The hotter the core temp, the lower the thermal margin. If you are idling at 90C-ish or more, you should be in the negative readings in thermal margin.
http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-technologies/technologies-gaming/over-drive
 
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hyperthreadedm

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Hey, thanks for the AMD Overdrive link. It seems that my thermal margin is at 18 degrees Celsius, which I'm assuming isn't good... Also, very strangely, all I have running on the desktop at the moment is AVG antivirus, this web browser, and AMD Overdrive, and my CPU is above 50% load on all cores. (I can hear the noisy stock fan as I type this.) I feel like something is wrong with the CPU itself, I've built 2 AMD systems in the past and never had something as strange as this before.

I have a Seidon 120V water cooler coming from Newegg soon, I had bought it a week ago but had to RMA due to clicky pump noises. Once that comes in, I'll be able to rule out if it's a cooler problem. but, the stock cooler should be capable of holding my CPU over for the time being, why am I getting such bad temps??? I just don't understand.

 
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hyperthreadedm

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Oh, and another thing, I have my windows task manager open, and the CPU is fluctuating from 30 degrees celcius to 70 very quickly with no applications running, and windows alone is using over 4gb of RAM???????? What the hell is going on with this PC???? I'm startign to think this isn't the cooler's fault...

 
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clutchc

clutchc

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Yeah, I agree. Something else is at play. What is the CPU temp idling in BIOS? It should not be much higher than mid 40s at most unless you have a hot house in a hot locale.
Btw, 18C thermal margin at idle is indeed not good. Proving that the core temp readings were not flukes after all.

Any chance you have acquired a virus or some really bad malware?
 
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hyperthreadedm

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Hey dude, I figured it out!

I had recently done a windows update and it fixed my problems totally, I can no longer hear my cpu and on idle it's at 40 Celsius!

Turns out the CPU was always on load due to background processes that I didn't see in the task manager. I went into my bios and temps were at 47 Celcius which is pretty average for all my systems, I live in south FL where it is hot all the time, so I knew it had to be a problem with windows messing up thermals. I went to the recourse monitor after and saw some SCVHOST.EXE program was taking up over 50% of my CPU and my RAM aswell. After a windows update, my thermals are now fixed, and everything is stable

I want to thank you for helping me figure out that it wasn't a cooling problem. Also want to thank you for recommending me AMD Overdrive, it's a very accurate and simple tool! Once that seidon 120v comes in, maybe I can get a small overclock.

Thanks so much, good to knowthe people at Toms hardware has got my back!

 
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clutchc

clutchc

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Glad to hear all is back to normal. But scvhost is always doing something. That's normal. Might still want to run a virus update and full scan. Smae with Malwarebytes. Then run CCleaner and do the Clean and Registry portions both.
https://www.malwarebytes.org/
 
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