Troubleshooting an overheating CPU
- by Jeff Fry
I & my father just recently put together a new PC. Specs below.
From the very beginning, on boot it will often complain that the CPU is too hot. If I sit in BIOS and watch the CPU, it'll drop back down from red to blue (<72C), at which point I've tended to just boot into Windows...and haven't had any problems. In fact, I've played a couple hours straight of Skyrim at max settings, and not had any visible issues.
That said, I've occasionally walked away & come back to find that it's crashed. Yesterday, it crashed (while idle) twice in 12 hours, which shifted the balance from busy-with-life to nervous-I'm-about-to-melt-something.
I just installed Core Temp which is showing my 4 cores fluxuating between 70-98C.
I'm guessing at this point that the CPU fan may be incorrectly installed or defective. My first thought is to either (a) add water cooling (which the case supports) and / or (b) replace the CPU fan with an after-market one. That said, I'm very open to suggestions. A note, while I certainly don't want to burn money here, I have a baby coming any day now and am still unpacking from a recent move so if I have a choice between an option that costs money and another that takes a while...I'll happily spend a bit extra.
Side question: Should I be nervous to even have this on at this point?
Let me know if there's something useful I could add to my report. Otherwise, I'm looking forward to your suggestions! Thanks.
CPU
Intel i7-2600 CPU w/ stock fan
Other HW
ASUS P8Z68-V Pro motherboard
64G SSD boot drive
4 older SATA HDs
GIGABYTE ATI Radeon HD6950 1 GB DDR5
8G Kingston T1 Series RAM
Corsair 650W Gold Certified power supply
Antec P280 case