Temperature keeps rising

[Fats10]

Hey all,
I'm kind of a noob when it comes to all this I just know some of the basics so forgive me if I've left anything out.

When idling everything seems to be okay but when running games it will run for a few minutes then shutoff. I browsed the Tom's Hardware forums and found most saying it was the power supply however I just wanted to make sure before I buy one. My specs are:

AMD Phenom 9550 Quad Core
Asus M2N-SLi Mobo
4 GB DDR2 RAM (I can't remember but think it's OCZ Dual channel)
GeForce 9600GT Video
320 GB Hard Drive (Can't remember brand)

First I did a full system scan for viruses and malware and actually did find a few bad files and removed them. Tested by running game again and received same result.

I then dusted out the inside of the towers using dry paper towels and removed the video card and dusted it off as well. Again I received the same result.

So I downloaded OCCT to retrieve the temps and the GPU/Core stay around 50.5C when idling and typing this message, when starting game it keeps raising until 80C then shuts off. So I ran the power supply test that comes with the OCCT proggy and sure enough the temps kept raising until I aborted at 79C and they quickly dropped back to 50.5.

I'm kind of strapped for cash at the moment so I just wanted to try and narrow down the problem a little more. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[hunter315]

What are your CPU temps at? Those temps are fine for the GPU, and with a 9600GT you would have to have a pretty crappy PSU for it to be unable to handle it.

 

[Fats10]

Thanks for reply. All 4 CPU temps are between 50.5-53C GPU is staying around 63C. All these temps are when idling. I've been running this rig for almost 2 years and has been fine up until this point. The power supply is a 450watt that came with an Ultra case.

 

[hunter315]

50C at idle for the CPU? That would be your issue, see how high they get under load, AMD gives the 9550 a max temp of 70C, if you are already at least 20C over ambient at idle im willing to bet you exceed it quite a bit under load.

 

[Fats10]

Took a few screenshots. Hope this helps.

 

[Fats10]

Okay. Do I need to look into a new CPU Fan?

 

[hunter315]

From the looks of speed fan only one of your CPU cores is underload which doesnt tell us too much about your load temps. Use HW monitor so you can see the temps of each core and throw it under max load using Prime 95, be aware that prime will cause you to BSOD if your CPU is unstable or if you have memory issues so if it blue screens dont be too surprised.

 

[Fats10]

Okay, this text file is a totally different language to me lol. I ran Prime and stopped it after about 2 minutes. Here's the Monitor file: Click Here

 

[hunter315]

From the looks of this line
Temperature 0 69°C (156°F) [0x45] (CPU)

It would appear that you are able to hit a chip temp of 69C with only 2 minutes of prime, that doesnt speak highly of the longer term temp control, its probably overheating after a few minutes especially since games would have the GPU pumping heat into the system too.

Open it up and clean some of the dust out, get some compressed air to clean out the CPU heatsink as its probably full of dust and not working so well anymore, that should help your temps.

 

[Fats10]

Okay, I have a German Shepperd so dust and dog hair finds it's way into some unbelievable places. When I cleaned it out earlier it was quite dusty but I will try the compressed air also. I appreciate your help. I'll be back in a bit.

 

[Fats10]

Alrighty. I blew everything out with an air compressor. Fired it back up and noticed the boot up was much faster then earlier today. All temps were way lower also, until I started a game (Tiger Woods Online). They started raising again but much slower this time. I got about 15 minutes of play, compared to the 5 minutes earlier, before the Core/GPU both reached 79C so I exited the game before it shut me off. Also I noticed when running the game it looked like everything was running on one core again instead of sharing the workload (if that's what it's supposed to do).

So I gave it a few minutes to cool off and took another SS:

As you can see the temperature has dropped from 79C to 59C within 5-7 minutes after closing the game.

Not sure what else it can be but I'm grateful for any input.

 

[hunter315]

Thats a much more reasonable temp, for the CPU when at idle, as for the GPU, its perfectly fine at 80C, GPUs are made differently so they are safe up to 90-100C normally.

I would suggest running HW monitor in the background as it will record the highest temperature reached while you are gaming, then post a screen shot of it rather than the log file.

As for the core loading, its probably a single threaded game in which case all the load is supposed to go on one core, the hardware cannot split the workload unless the software already split it into seperate threads.

 

[Fats10]

Okay I tried running it pretty hard while running HWM. I had Tiger Woods Online running in browser and also started Photoshop at the same time just to see if it would shut off and it looked to slow down around here:

Also, should I feel air coming from the back of the power supply? I don't feel barely any movement at all besides from the 120mm fan right below it.