I7 way too hot even on idle. What's going on?

[lilbro209]

So I have been getting very concerned with the following issue. I am pretty new to messing with bios and whatnot so I have done a lot of reading. One of the things I have noticed right off the bat is what most of you are saying should be normal temps in idle and under full load.

I have a CG5290 which is a computer released by ASUS a few years ago. When I am at stock speeds with no overclocking on either GPU, CPU or RAM my idle temps are between 48 and 53 on all 4 cores. I see that most of you are talking about temps being in the 20's on idle and 50-60's during load and this is frustrating to me. I can see that the cooler on the processor is not stock but it doesn't look very high end either. I will take pictures and include them in this post best I can. I have purchased Arctic Silver 5 with the intention of trying that but before any actual work is done I wanted to find out what could be the cause of this. These are my specs...

Rampage GENE II MOBO ( a stripped down version for this model of pc )
9GB DDR3 ( 3x2gb ) + ( 3x1gb ) @ 1066 triple channel
i7920
ASUS ENGTX260 216 TOP


I would really appreciate any help I can get on this. I cannot afford a new cooler right now so I am forced to work with what I got.

 

[IntelEnthusiast]

Over a period of years thermal paste can dry up or the HSF (heatsink/fan) may loosen up and not make contact as well as it should. So it is a good idea to remove the HSF and re-apply new thermal paste and re-seat your HSF to make sure it is making good contact. Also over time the HSF may pick up dust causing it not to bleed of heat as well as it did earlier in its life. So it helps to make sure that you clean off any dried on dust. A can of compressed air does a good job of this but some times it takes more effort to get it off.

Also so programs are better at reading the temperatures than others. My experience is that HWMoniter is one of the better ones out there.