Hi all-

When I first built this system, I was having a major heat issue which was causing bad performance while playing video games. I ended up taking the chip out, re-doing the thermal paste and reinstalling it. That took care of the problems I was having, idle temps were around 30 degrees.

Fast forward 5 months to tonight when I just randomly decided to check my temps and saw that both cores idle around 43-45 degrees...

When I play a game, it goes up to the high 60s. There have been no problems whatsoever, and if I hadn't looked I wouldn't have known the temps have been this high.

Question is, should I worry? Or should I not care as long as there are no apparent performance issues?

dust in the heatsink maybe?

high 60's will not hurt it....its a bit warm....

Yeah I was going to open up the case tomorrow and blow it all out... I hadn't thought about dust, but that's probably it. I run the PC almost continuously

and if its the stock heatsink they sure collect dust fast...

Yep, stock heatsink =O

my friend got his P4(3.0HT) over 100c just from dust alone....

^ wow. that is insane.

i hate dust. they just screw ur pc's temp. lol

So cool, I blow out my case/motherboard/cpu etc and now the thing won't boot up. It started to, got to the desktop and shut itself off. Now it won't boot up at all (it starts to, but stops before anything even comes up on the screen).

No, I didn't shake the can as I was using it. No, I didn't see any liquid come out of the nozzle.

Any ideas?

re-seat components(RAM VGA, ect).

The air may have blown the dust into the contacts causing problems. I take those parts out when cleaning normally to clean the slots out too....

In all my years i have never had cleaning a computer hurt it.....

Also make sure that the heatsink has not come loose. You would be surprised how easy it is to knock loose the stock heatsink...

This ended up being the problem. It was ridiculously loose...

You're a genius =)

Reapply the thermal paste if needed....