Concerned with E8400 temps (questions with screenshots)

Hi everyone,

I just built my first system in 10 years =P Was lazy in between as life passed by and went the pre-made route but finally back to building.. Went really well but I have some questions regarding my CPU temps. I've read the sticky regarding temp, Tjunctions etc but I've got to be honest, it confused me. Anyhow, I've listed my computer spec's below then my specific questions regarding temps.

System:

Tagan ABS BZ700 700W Power Supply
Intel E8400 Wolfdale
4gig Crucial Ballistix DDR2
2x 250g Seagate 7200.10 3m/SATA
Nvidia 8800 GT OC 512mb
Asus SATA DVR-W
Gigabyte P35-DS3R Motherboard
Zalman 9700 CPU cooler
Antec 900 case

Fans:

2x 120mm in front of the HD bays sucking air in across the HDs
1x 220mm fan in the top of the case blowing air out
1x 120mm fan in the back of the case blowing air out
Zalman 9700 fan is facing the ram, sucking air through the cooler and the air is exiting the rear 120mm fan
And of course the Tagan ABS BZ700 is installed on the bottom of the case blowing air toward the video card


I'm looking to move the E8400 to 4ghz but its currently set on stock settings and I wanted to make sure the cooling was OK prior to making any changes. The Zalman 9700 is mounted tight using Artic Cooling MX-2 and was spread exactly as outlined on their website.

Using Core Temp to determine temps my idle tempatures are:

Core0 41C
Core1 44C

Using Core Temp to determine my load temps (Prime 95 dual with affinity set on both cores to 100%)

Core0 51C
Core0 54C


However, when in speedfan it reports my temp as 34C and my CPU1 temp as 27C (as does the Gigabyte hardware monitor) My ambient temp is about 21C. The P35's BIOS is up to date.

So, in short, what tempature is actually right. 41-44C idle seems high to me on stock settings (maybe I'm wrong, I dunno) and my load temps of 51-54C on stock settings seem high, but I don't know if these temps are actually right or what. I don't understand the difference between the speedfan numbers. Anyhow, I don't want to even think about OCing prior to working out my temp issues which is why I'm here.

I've included some screenshots of idle, load, and load with hardware monitor up to show the different settings, any thoughts/suggestions would be appriciated.

(Also, this is somewhat of a cross post and I appoligize.. I posted in Cooler section first but thought that since I was really looking to ensure the temps could support OCing I posted here)

What the Gigabyte and speedfan is reporting is the Tcase, while coretemp is reporting the Tjunction. They are both correct temperatures. Tcase reads the temperature between the cores while Tjunction is reporting the actual core temp. Compu will clear this up with a lot better explanation.