CPU temp seems very high

prodigousranger

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May 29, 2011
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I just installed a new CPU because my older one was running hotter than normal. around 60C when playing games before it was never higher than 55C or so. Even on idle it was around 45C which it normally was around 38C. Since it was 4-5 years old I decided to upgrade from that Athlon X2 64 2.8 dual to a Phenom II 3.5 quad I also picked up 2 80mm case fans to bring air in the front, previously all my fans were in positions to blow hot air out so I wanted some to bring cool air in.

When i first put it in it ran cooler like 38C idle. And I never got it up to high temps because it would crash whenever I did high intensity stuff. I found in my BIOS that the frequency was set at weird values so I set it to the normal 200, and then also set voltage to auto regulate(which I later set to normal values). The CPU now runs everything without crashing. However, it idles at 48C and stays around 60C when playing games. Also while rendering some 3d stuff it was reported at 70C in all cores! I am not sure what to do to get this temperature down. Any ideas?
 

haphestus

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Feb 4, 2011
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sounds like a crap cpu cooler or poorly applied thermal paste.

if you dont know how to overclock then set the bios to default or optimal.

take take the cpu cooler off , clean the paste off and get some arctic silver paste the google how to apply it correctly.

custom pc have a good artical on this. its easier for you to do this than for me to explain

cheers
 

katfishgr

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I hope you are not using a stock Althlon heatsink on that Phenom cpu ... might be part of the problem. Or did your Phenom come with a replacement heatsink? If not, get yourself a decent heatsink/fan for the Phenom. And use Artic Silver thermal compound as others have mentioned. Those temps are not that bad though ... but a good heatsink/fan will bring them down a bit more.
 

joshybo7

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Sep 28, 2011
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I just purchased some shin-etsu G-751 from www.frozencpu.com, which it is available at other sites too, i think www.newegg.com has it under the brand masscool, it actually lowered my temps ~10C depending on load and fan speed as opposed to arctic silver 5. honestly, it is the best compound i have ever used, applied using the pea-sized application after warming it up for ~10 minutes. just a suggestion for helping lower temperatures.
 

prodigousranger

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I used some OCZ ultra silver 5+ compound. It is about 4 years old but my roommate used the same tube on his cpu and hasn't had trouble, that he knows of. I have an older Kingwin cooler that is fairly substantial. Altogether the fins are bigger than my fist, it's kind of odd though it has 5 copper tubes that are attacked to the copper base that wrap around the fan and the fan blows outward to cool the fins. It worked great. My last CPU was an Athlon 64 X2 5400, and it was running hot the last couple months as well. but had no trouble before a few months ago. Finally I am using Core temp to monitor it. Some people have told me that these temps aren't bad, and that the Phenoms are good to operate until 95C. But to be honest I get scared when it goes above 70 during rendering.