CPU temperature

[zaza]

Anybody got experience of what temperature a quad-core CPU should run at? It's an Intel QX6750, I think. About a year old. Not overclocked. I seem to recall my old single-core ones back in the day ran at about 60-70C? Mine's currently at 110C according to the BIOS, which seems a bit high.....

Also, my PC keeps switching itself off, and has happened even when I was just in the BIOS, so not OS related.

[kfcSmitty]

It is definitely a bit high. I looked around a bit and the general census seems to be that anything over 60-70 is gonna cause issues. 60-70 still being rather sketchy.

35-50 seems to be the norm. Try cleaning off the heat-sync and putting new thermal paste on the CPU.

[mendhak]

Definitely your CPU resetting itself. If it's under warranty you'll have to get them to have a look at it. Or you can open it up yourself to look at the problem. Maplins should have all the paste you need. Or move to Antarctica.

[I_Love_My_Vans]

It could be your mobo temp sensor...

My Q6600 is overclocked to 3.0GHz (from 2.4), and runs at 45*C (Water cooled), but, when stressing it will happily go up to 80*C.

My point being, if you can test on another board then you will figure out whether the sensor is wrong, otherwise, if your really that worried, do what the frog said and send it back.

Edit - Oh and by the way, your BIOS can be set to turn of the machine when the CPU hits a certain temperature, depending on whether your mobo temp sensor is faulty you may be able to change or disable this. Also, if you can get hold of a digital temperature sensor you could attempt to verify the temperature.

Edit 2 - I also had an old E2180 Dual core that ran at about 87*C constantly, that was a faulty mobo sensor.

[mendhak]

There's also Everest Ultimate Edition (trial ware) which you can run from Windows... it'll throw a million little icons into your systray, one of them being your CPU temperature.

http://www.lavalys.com/

[mendhak]

http://www.lavalys.com/products/down...?ps=UE&lang=en

[I_Love_My_Vans]

Core temp is another good one...

[zaza]

Currently in the process of backing up everything onto an external drive, hopefully before the PC keels over again. I suspect that software to look at the CPU temperature is going to show the same thing as the BIOS, no? It's got to use the same temperature sensor....
It's under warranty, 1Y onsite followed by 2Y RTB. Sadly I'm just outside the year so it'll have to go back.

What is somewhat suspicious though is that we bought 2 computers at the time; one for me and one for my brother. His started doing exactly the same thing about 2 weeks ago.

[Lord Orwell]

did you verify the fan is still turning?

[zaza]

Yep. All the fans are going, the dust is cleaned out.

[Lord Orwell]

Yep. All the fans are going, the dust is cleaned out.

well then there is only two possibilities: Either the heatsink isn't set in place anymore or the sensor is bad. Don't know how but perhaps if the installer didn't put the thermal tape/paste on properly.

[zaza]

If the sensor is bad, then it implies that there isn't a problem with the temperature, so there must be another reason why my PC keeps switching off.

Also, it lasts longer if I'm just surfing the net or emailing. If I run up some spreadsheets which do some meaty calculations, or fire up an intensive video game (eg Oblivion), it cuts out within 10 mins.

That suggests to me that extra load on the CPU is the problem, and perhaps it's enough to heat it up beyond what it can take. The heatsink does seem to be firmly in place.
My thoughts are that the thermal paste might have degraded (?) so as to be less conductive perhaps?
Grrrrr.

[zaza]

Well, I decided to take it apart anyway and let the warranty take care of itself. And the results were...

The heatsink itself was full of dust. It's a bit of a funny shape, I guess to improve surface area, and as a result had gotten clogged up. Toothpick used, temperature now down to around 40C. Just goes to show, never assume you have gotten rid of all the dust until you take it apart.

Lovely.

[Lord Orwell]

Well, I decided to take it apart anyway and let the warranty take care of itself. And the results were...

The heatsink itself was full of dust. It's a bit of a funny shape, I guess to improve surface area, and as a result had gotten clogged up. Toothpick used, temperature now down to around 40C. Just goes to show, never assume you have gotten rid of all the dust until you take it apart.

Lovely.

i understand completely. My arctic 7 clogs up about once a month when i use it. Thick clumpy dust. The wider blade setup in my HP has never clogged. Also for future reference, a temp sensor never go bad to where it reads the wrong value. It will just stop working altogether. But if it HAD somehow done this, your bios would shut the system down based on faulty readings no matter what the actual temp was, unless you disabled temp shutdown.

[mendhak]

I preemptively dust to prevent such situations. Others call it obsession, but it probably makes sense to some.

[Jenner]

Air compressor once every 3 months on my system. 120psi blasts all the dust out.

[Lord Orwell]

Air compressor once every 3 months on my system. 120psi blasts all the dust out.

and extraneous parts as well such as ribbon cables, processors, memory...