A Question about Power Consumption

[smnbackwards]

I have an AMD Athlon II x4 640 running with a stock cooler. The 640 has a maximum temperature of 70/71 degrees celcius, and runs at 95W. When I looked at the temperatures of the cpu I thought they looked a little hot, idling around 41, and reaching 69 when running the cores at 100% with prime 95. My initial solution was to install some case fans, which are keeping the system temperature at 43 even at full load. However, the processor is still reaching the high 60's (I swear I saw 69 again, but at the moment it is at 66) What jumps out at me, is that the processor is always running at exactly 106.4 W. I have cool' n' Quiet enabled, so I figure that the alternating clock speeds should change the power consumption, and the fact that the power is always 11W over, despite the voltage being a stock 1.4V. I now have a few questions.

Is it normal for the power to be completely unchanging?
What could be the cause of these strange power readings? Faulty sensor?
Could this extra power be the cause for the high heat levels?
And... Is it time for a new cooler? (running this hot almost makes me want to underclock the processor)

Thanks for your time, and here are some screen shots,
Niklas

 

[o1die]

The propus 640 will run fine up to 70-75c, so you're ok. If you want to spend more money on a better cooler, then you can, but it's not necessary. Do you plan to keep your system for ten years? If no, then I think it will run fine with the stock cooler during the three year warranty period. You can remove the original thermal material using isopropyl alcohol or acetate (in finger nail polish remover) and reinstall with arctic silver 5 or your favorite brand of thermal paste, but don't expect the temps to drop more than 3-5 degrees celcius.

 

[smnbackwards]

Its running at stock 3GHz. As far as gpu goes I have an HIS Hd 5670, and the psu is a generic 350W.
I don't think the airflow is obstructed, there are no cables in the way. I have one front intake fan, and a rear exhaust fan aswell as the psu exhaust.
Do you have any idea about the processors power consumption?

 

[o1die]

Look for a sandy bridge article which compares power comsumption of several cpus. Both tom's and anandtech have recent sandy bridge articles.

 

[moody89]

I have the Athlon II X4 620 and my power consumption is a steady 100W as well so I'm assuming that's fairly normal. However I notice that your VCore is toward the upper limit of your CPUs nominal range. The nominal range for your chip is:

0.90-1.425V

SOURCE:
http://products.amd.com/en-na/DesktopCPUDetail.aspx?id=594

You may want to drop your VCore value down a tad which may help reduce temps. I had the same issue with my X4 620 and lowering the voltages made a fairly significant difference in temperatures. For reference I have mine set to 1.18V I think so it's a fair bit lower than the BIOS sets at Auto. You will have to manually go into the BIOS to change this setting if you're comfortable doing so. You can always have a play around with this setting and see what works best for your system - obviously if you have any stability issues you can revert back to a higher VCore. If you're not overclocking I personally don't see the need to have VCore set to the upper limit of the nominal voltage range.