How to be sure of cpu temps?

[ooagentbender]

Ok I posted a little while ago that I was worried about my cpu temp, but I get conflicting numbers out of programs. When I run a program on windows it doesn't give me a temperature for my cpu but it gives me the cpu fan speed as 2000+ rpm. Which is really slow, but when I look in the bios configuration ultility before start up it says that the fan is running at 4500 rpm and my cpu temp is 60c. Which should I believe? I am inclined to believe bios but I just wanted to check here. I don't want to replace my heat sink if I don't have to as putting on that force into doing those things around the motherboard freaks me out.

Thanks

[pezplaya]

Get a temp probe and get it as close to the core of the cpu as u can and go from there.

[ooagentbender]

kewl thanks I bet they have one in the ics department here at school.

tanx

[tmcG]

60C!!! That is smoking! My CPU runs at about 37-40C at most (A PIII 650).

ooagentbender, that seems way too high! I think you are right to suspect your fan. I wold be inclined to believe your BIOS, rather than a third party app.

One thing to check also is, have you removed your fan and heatsink recently and placed them back on the CPU? If so you may have the part of the heatsink that extracts the heat around the wrong way (I am not being funny, I know someone that did this with an AMD chip and they put the heatsink on with the part that best removes the heat, or sweetspot, up away from the chip. This caused the CPU to stop after 30 seconds of use and it was fried so chances are this isn't what is wrong for you!):)

[varkk]

It is possible that the Heatsink is not attached to the CPU properly so is unable to effectivly cool it like it should. The other thing is that often inbuilt temperature diodes in CPUs/motherboards are not calibrated correctly so it may just be giving you a wrong number, the best answer then is to get another temp probe, check it's calibration and then use that to test your CPUs temperature (Which unless you can get it into good thermal contact with the core still won't be accurate).

[ooagentbender]

Sigh, yah this is bothering me, my volcano 10 is coming in today and hopefully ill put it on tonight (which I hate doing because of the amount of force you have to put into it), I would really like to see a major difference in the temperature in there because it is really bothering me.

peace.

[Arjay]

On my windows desktop my cpu, Athlon 2200+ sits around 36C under windows with a big GlobalWin fan cooling it. In between the heatsink and cpu core i have applied Arctic Silver compound to help with the cooling.

On my Laptop however, i have just installed Slackware and i'm using acpi along with acpid, my cpu hovers around 49-50C and rises to 63-65C if compiling something, like the kernel. Dunno if this is high or not, it can sit at 49C without the fan kicking in so i would imagine it is okay.

Cheers :)

[ooagentbender]

I just put the new fan in with artic silver and it dropped down to 48c so im good and happy now. If it burns up for some reason I can buy a new one but I think it should be fine from here on out.

[hardcore]

As for the fan, the program in windows could be displaying the rotation speed of a case fan and not your HSF rpm's.

[EnigmaOne]

Living in a seriously dusty environment sucks.

My old-faithful Athlon over-temp'd and died on me in the middle of an unattended, long compile job.

A new uP, HS/F, M/B & memory are on their way to me, but I miss my own machine...and my files.

Maybe I'll switch to freon cooling.