Ambiguous CPU temperatures using Speccy and MSI afterburner??

[monkey4sale]

Hi there, I recently built a system for my friend for everyday computing and LIGHT gaming

specs are

ASUS A88XM-A motherboard Socket FM2
AMD APU A6-6400K Black Edition (3.90GHz Richland Dual Core Processor, Socket FM 2)
AMD stock cooler
HyperX FURY Series 8GB (2x 4GB) DDR3 1866MHz CL10 DIMM Memory Module Kit - Black
Kingston Technology 120GB Solid State Drive 2.5-inch V300 SATA 3
EVGA 500W PC Power Supply
Asus AMD Radeon R7 250 1GB GDDR5 Graphics Card (PCI Express 3.0, HDMI, DVI-D, 128 Bit)
windows 10- 64 bit



Upon build completion everything was hunky dory- My friend was delighted with such a fast powerful PC which cost him circa £200 (as I gifted him the GPU) ..... having come from an 8 year old P4 dell machine .

Anyway I noted that the CPU temp was idling at 41c in the BIOS before handing the machine over to him........(I have read this is not entirely strange for Richland CPUs with stock cooler)

He decided to experiment with gaming ( older games at modest settings obviously) likes of fifa 12-13 and need for speed etc

He found that these games were crashing after playing for a while and also experienced one or two system crashes.

Told him to download speccy and report the cpu temp to me ---> speccy reported the cpu temp to be 60c with very little going on in terms of apps being open i.e when NOT gaming and not doing anything intensive on the system.

I bought him a Scythe Shuriken CPU cooler for his birthday last week
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Scythe-Shuriken-SCSK-1100-Processor-Cooler/dp/B001R2KSZW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1456135447&sr=8-2&keywords=SCYTHE+SHURIKEN

and one of these

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004ZSC0XS?keywords=pci%20cooler&qid=1456134887&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1

Rebooted the Pc once I had all installed - used arctic silver thermal compound also..

Went into the BIOS and the temp was 28c ( was previously 41c) SO all seemed well

Tried to teach my friend how to uses tools to monitor CPU and GPU temps. So downloaded both MSI afterburner and most recent edition of Speccy....

Here is where things get a little ODD,

Having just read the CPU temp 30 seconds earlier in BIOS to be 28c ....Speccy reports CPU temp of 60-62c with literally no other apps/programs open.....Now it gets weirder....
MSI afterburner shows the CPU temp to be 0c which is fluctuating between 0c and 18c and hitting 22 max with a few youtube videos running..... ( YES THAT IS RIGHT 0c)

So..... any ideas what is happening here my learned friends? Any advice apart from see how we go? 🙂

Sorry for longwinded post by the way 🙂

 

[DonkeyOatie]

Use AMD's Overdrive for temperature and thermal margin measurements on AMD CPUs, everything else can be very unreliable. AMD's CPUs lack thermocouples or thermistors, so 'calculate' temperatures from algorithms. A lot of software has issues with that.

 

[synphul]

You might want to try amd overdrive. Either that or amd's system monitor.

http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMDSystemMonitor.aspx

Many programs have a tough time reporting accurate temps when it comes to amd's apu's and cpu's due to the odd way it provides temp data. It's not uncommon for other programs to give all sorts of results whether extremely high or extremely low (obviously no air or aio cooler can cool below ambient).

 

[monkey4sale]

Thanks to you both for your answers, makes sense ! Will advise my friend and report back!

 

[monkey4sale]

Thanks to both of you who answered. I have heard back from my friend who owns this build and is now using AMD system monitor to monitor temperatures and his temps range from 28c to 73c when gaming. I.e entirely normal temperatures! Thanks.