Q6600 Overheating??

I recently built a machine with a P5Q PRO mobo, Q6600 CPU, and 650W COOLER MASTER PSU. When I mounted the heatsink, I didn't apply any thermal paste, because I figured the "thermal pad" would be sufficient since I don't really plan on doing any overclocking.

However, right away I had problems with the CPU overheating...in the BIOS it would reach over 100 C and then shut off. After some fiddling with it (re-mounting the heatsink and making sure it was using default settings) I somehow got it to stay around 75 C in the BIOS and thus it wouldn't shut off on its own anymore. But, I could install XP just fine...and I ran some CPU stability tests for about 10 min that would put the CPU usage at 100% and it reported 0 errors. During these tests the CPU temp would read over 90 C.

Could these readings possibly be correct?? It's strange that there would seem to be NO performance problems when the CPU approaching 100 C. The heatsink seems to be on good and tight. I have ordered Arctic Silver thermal paste and I'm going to try to use that when it arrives.

Any ideas of what the problem may be? Could the temp sensor just be wrong? I haven't overclocked at all.

Note: After the CPU was supposedly above 90 degrees C, I did feel the heatsink, the PSU, etc, and none of it felt hot at all.

Also, I ran SiSoftware Sandra and got these results. I don't know much about voltages, overclocking, etc., but does any of this look out of the norm (besides the CPU temp)?





It's off-screen but it also says:

CPU Core Power: 76.83 W
CPU Cooling System Thermal Resistance: 0.46 degrees C per W
CPU Temperature: 64 C
Auto Fan Speed Control: Yes
CPU Fan: 1962 RPM
CPU DC Line 1.16V

The mobo temp is usually under 30 C. I'm using the stock cooler. I edited my first post with output from a monitoring software (it appears small on here so you'll probably need to save it and zoom in).

No, I did not. I will try AS5 once it arrives. Still, I wouldn't think it would get THAT hot (90-100 C???)

nah it shuts off before it damages itself... the question is though, what's to take that heat away once its shut off? eg if there was no heatsink on it at all, it would take forever to cool down... so if the HS wasnt making proper contact, the cpu would probably stay around 100C for a few minutes... damaging?