markperkin

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Jan 30, 2013
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Hello, i have an AMD athlon ii x4 640 cpu and i downloaded CPU temp yesterday because someone recommended to do so. Now with less than 6% of processor usage the CPU is between 50 and 53 degrees. I'm presuming this isn't good, could anyone please give me a few pointers in what to check etc.

Thanks in advance
Mark
 
That really isn't too terrible with a stock cooler and how old the paste probably is. A few things you could do to help it run cooler are: 1)Blow the dust out of the heatsink and 2)Repaste the cpu. If you want to verify the temps you can either look in bios or download hwmonitor to compare temps.
 

markperkin

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The paste is about a year and a half old, I only know as i installed it, is that old? I'm a complete newb with all this. I installed my new amd 7850 2gb GPU last night and tried a few games, the GPU went to about mid 60's where as the CPU was sat around 75! I'm sure the max is 71 for this CPU.
 

BuddiLuva

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You should have bought a 3rd party cooler for it anyway, stock coolers are known to be abit crappy. Either buy a 3rd party cooler or just re-paste and re-sit your current one.
 

markperkin

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If i was to buy a new one what should I be looking at, sorry for the stupid questions, I know it's an AM3 socket but what sort of price range would I need to look at, I was looking on ebuyer and they have some for around £5-£10 or would these be pointless?
 

BuddiLuva

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No problem, I would advise staying away from those kind of coolers, there's a good one called Hyper 212 Plus or Hyper 212 Evo for about 25 quid. Those are pretty notorious as good cooling. Especially on Toms Hardware.
 

markperkin

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Nedal, no not had any issues as such, just a little worried at the temp that CPU Temp was telling me the CPU core's were at. As i said AMD claim the highest is 71 and mine was at 73-75 when running the GPU Benchmark on Sleeping dogs.
 

markperkin

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I've been browsing forum's today whenever i've had a spare moment and people seem to be worried when their CPU was getting above 50 (same CPU).
 

Nedal0

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I understand your concerns.

I will suggest the first thing you do is make sure the PSU, Case, CPU and Heat Sink Fans are clean. If your Temps don't drop with this action, you will have to reapply Thermal Paste.

Basically the first step is very minimal and should cost you very little or nothing at all. I do not believe there is the need to buy a new Heat Sink now as your Temps are probably up because of the two reason I mentioned above.

Take a step by step approach and I'm sure you'll be glad you did. I don't suggest you invest in any hardware for now.
 

markperkin

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Ok, case opened last night, cleaned out and thermal paste reapplied and still identical temperatures. To be fair there wasn't much to clean, it was pretty much dust free in there. I'm going to try side of case off later with a normal home type fan blowing into it and see if that changes it much.