Hello, this is an old system, asus a7n8x motherboard. I had been having some crashing and random problems with this setup, so i ran memtest and found the ram was bad. replaced it with a gig of kingston pc3200, seemed to be ok. checked the motherboard temp, around 70C!! seems very high to me! when hot like this, playing movies with winamp have glitches / lags sometimes.

what is an accurate monitor for motherboard and cpu temps? perhaps i need to do a new layer of thermal paste on the chip? thanks

im going to get some articcleaner and some artic silver, and clean/reset the chip heatsink tmrw, that must be causing the problems!?!

My pc crashed a couple of years ago when being stressed in-game.
I wasn't sure what the problem was so I took everything apart, cleaned up the CPU and added some new thermal paste. Everything was fine since then and the CPU has ran about 8-10 degress cooler at idle. I expect reseating your CPU and paste could do the same thing as you yourself have suggested. Doesn't do any harm to clean up inside the case some more and try to make wiring even better for airflow. Good Luck.

hello, i took the heatsink off and the thermal "paste" that was previously applied is subpar.

it is smudged and smeared around, and is overall messy. (small bit of extra paste on chip)
anyways, ran to cc and got some antec 88% silver jst to hold me over till i get some as5.

will see how this works, will upload before pics if i can figure out how to attach

can i only link already uploaded pic? what if i have no server??

thx for the help