How hot is too hot?

[g4kioN1]

Hey guys i've been pretty passive with overclocking my 955BE it's almost a year old and i still have not overclocked it. The reason being, my Temps are way too high, abnormally high. i remember when i first installed it i reapplied thermal paste atleast 5 times and tried 3 different coolers

stock amd cooler
hyper 212 plus
cool it water cooling

now having idle temps in 50c is very abnormal because i know how to apply thermal paste but i have an itchy feeling it actually my temp sensor. My motherboard was fried during a storm and i actually sent it to asus to have it repaired for a dying ethernet port. One thing i never tried sending it for was the motherboards temperature reading on the cpu. i was just curious what the chances of the sensor not working correctly

not only did i try 3 coolers, i've used 3 cpus also. the 720BE and the 9550. now i did see a difference when i used different motherboards.

now here is the real question, if amd overdrive reads my temps idle at 50 and it goes in the high 60s and passes amd overdrive's stability test should i worry? im only going up to 3.6 ghz. buying a new motherboard is kinda out of the question since i have an asus m3a32-mvp deluxe im kind of attached to it since temps are the only thing wrong with it.

Thanks for reading guys please give me some feedback, while gaming i havent had my computer bluescreen or anything. some games crash and freeze but nothing abnormal. let me know if i should risk overclocking without truly seeing the temps or if i should remain passive until a new motherboard.

 

[sportsfanboy]

The crash and freezing while gaming is probably memory setting related or possibly an underpowered psu. What program are you using to measure temperature? Your saying the temperature is the same when going from the stock fan to the 212 plus and coolit correct?

 

[g4kioN1]

well i have a 750 watt psu, alienware brand and i think the max load is in the high 600s. i would usually boot up and use the bios to see what my idle temps were and they were all the same, then i started to use cpuz and occt and now im using amd overdrive. but all of these read off the same source right? the motherboard? and yes i tried the hyper 212 plus. and the freezing occured only when exiting sc2 and black ops has a lot of problems when i played full screen vs window mode.

yesterday while i made this thread i was in the middle of an amd stability test and it passed fine at 3.6 but when i tried 3.8 it blue screened almost immediantly if that helps. at the moment im still at stock 3.2

 

[sportsfanboy]

What does the temperature say in coretemp? And are you running your ram at spec or are you overclocking it?

 

[g4kioN1]

running everything default and i downloaded core temp and it also says in the 50s

after applying new thermal paste arctic silver it is now idling at the high 40s
the current cooler i have is http://www.coolitsystems.com/index.php/en/eco.html

and i have the option of switching to a gemini II s lmk.

 

[g4kioN1]

one of the reasons i think the blue screened happened when overclocking to 3.8 was due to the lack of increased voltage.