CPU Overheating & Running at 50-100%

[Theladydelia]

Recently starting have trouble with my CPU over heating and running at 50-100% when I am only running 1 program - World of Warcraft. I don't have the settings particularly high, and I recently added 2gig of ram to it. I opened up Windows Task Manager and watched the performance to see if it was the CPU or memory that was causing the jumps. Sure enough, whenever the game started lagging, the CPU would jump from 5-20% to 50-100%. Also, last night I was messing around with it and checking in the computer if the fans were working, everything was plugged in correctly, I noticed that the CPU and Heat sink were extremely hot - burning to the touch. I powered on the machine to see how hot they had gotten, and saw it was at 131 degrees F. I took it apart and let the CPU and heat sink cool...But that still did not help with the performance.

Currently I am running an Pentium 4 3.0 with 2gig ram(Cosair XMS DDR 400 PC 3200) on an ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe motherboard. I also have 3 case fans - 1 in the back, 1 in the side, and 1 on top...

I'm wondering if it is the new memory I had put in, because it started happening shortly after I installed it....Just not immediately.

Any ideas would be helpful!

Thanks

 

[Scarchunk]

I'm assuming since you didn't say otherwise, that you are using the stock Intel heatsink/fan. You would get much better cooling from a third-party cooler from Zalman or Arctic Cooling, not to mention much quieter. You mention taking the heatsink off the cpu. Did you wipe all the old thermal paste off with alcohol and replace it with new paste? If not, you're bound to have high temps. If you temps are getting too high, your cpu will throttle and performance will decrease. Arctic Silver 5 is the best thermal paste out there, and works much better than the pre-applied Intel paste. Adding the RAM should have had no effect on the cpu temps.

 

[Theladydelia]

Yes I am using the Intel heatsink/fan...No I didn't replace the thermal paste, but I had heard it wasn't necessary. But it wouldn't hurt to try and replace the heatsink/fan and the thermal paste.. Especially since either way it would help

Thanks!

 

[Scarchunk]

The thermal paste is very neccesssary and it should help with your temps quite a bit. Be sure and clean off all the remnants from the old Intel paste off both the heatsink and the cpu heatspreader with alcohol. When reapplying the Arctic Silver 5(highly recommended) be sure not to use very much. Just put a small rice grain sized bit on the middle of the cpu heatspreader and place the heatsink directly on top of the heatspreader. This will spread the thermal paste out. There is a step by step instruction on the Arctic Silver website.