Troubleshooting an overheating CPU
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
Solution 1:
My father and I had the same problem. We had bought a computer from an electronic store. We had moved a long way after we bought it. When we opened the PC it booted just fine but when explorer.exe runs, it shut down.
Here is how we solved the problem...
We reinstalled the CPU fan, and what we noticed was that the thermal grease was applied incorrectly, and/or the thermal grease had worn off. So check your fan installation and use thermal grease.