In the warmer weather of late I have been noticing that the air under my desk (where the computer lives) has been getting fairly warm. So I decided that perhaps I had better check the temperature of my CPU as I am running a mild overclock and don’t want to burn out the CPU.
So I run HWMonitor and I am mildly alarmed at the temperature reading of approximately 50oC and that’s when the computer is sitting idle. After doing some gaming I discover this is reaching the high 70’s, and following a brief stress test with Prime95 it reaches 91oC before I stop the test. These temperatures are checked with CoreTemp also just in case there is an issue with the monitoring tool.
Background: My computer is running an Intel Q6600 overclocked to 3Ghz, Cooler Master TX2 cooler, running inside an Antec 900 case which previously had been keeping everything nice and cool. Or at least it was when I originally did the overclock.
Next port of call was Google to research the expected temperatures that I should be getting and this confirmed my thoughts that I should somewhere in the 30’s when idle and 50-60’s max when at load.
Gut instinct was then that something must be wrong with the cooler so started researching replacements. All this did was confuse me as there are so many on the market and no clear recommendation on what is a good value cooler.
It was then that I thought the best approach would be to open up the case and have a check how things looked inside, possibly with the aim of hoovering the inside as I thought maybe the air flow within the case had been disrupted. Obviously anyone who has opened a computer that has been running for a few years will know that a fair level of dust does get drawn into the case and this was the situation here. However I didn’t feel that there was sufficient dust to be causing the issue. It was only on closer inspection of the CPU cooler and having removed the CPU cooler fan that the amount of dust wedged between the cooling fins became apparent. Obviously this is not going to help the cooling as there was likely to be very little air flowing through the fins.
What followed was a brief flurry with the hoover inside the case and around the CPU cooler.
Everything replaced and the case side re-attached start the computer and hey presto, the idle temps are now in the 30’s and under load (Prime95) temps are in the 50’s.
Guess from now on part of my routine will be to annually hoover out the computer!
