My cpu has a temperature issue

Raspharus

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Jan 21, 2015
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Hello guys! I've been having this issue with my processor since quite some time. I have an AMD athlon II x4 740 processor, and it runs quite hot. Too hot actually. I know that generally CPU's have a max temperature where they can still operate, and mine seems to be achieving it quite a lot, especially when gaming. And this is quite unfortunate because my pc ends up restarting itself due to overheating. Now, I have taken into consideration the possibility of a faulty PSU, but it doesn't quite add up. My psu is pretty new(bought it 3 months ago). Moreover, restarts don't happen randomly, but only when gaming. I think that if the PSU would've been faulty restarts would just happen randomly regardless if I am doing CPU intensive tasks(like rendering or gaming)


Now more onto the actual issue. I used to have a stock cooler until like 6 months ago. One day I wanted to check my temperatures, without any reason. Now I have to say that before that I've never checked the temps on my CPU since I bought it. And the temperatures were quite bad. I was idling at 72 degrees C, and when I was running games, it went up to 94 C. And that's on a non overclocked CPU. Now my common sense told me that something is not right. I thought it was the thermal paste, so I changed it. But even so the CPU was still running too hot. The temps only dropped by about 5 degrees.

The next logical step would've been implying that the cooler is the problem here. It was a stock cooler after all so how good could it be? So I bought a new one an Arctic Freezer 7 pro rev.2. Now with an aftermarket cooler I thought that my temps are gonna decrease. I even read multiple reviews, and all CPU's performed relatively well using it, hitting normal temps. After I installed it however, my temps did decrease but not by a lot. Now I am idling at 50 degrees C, going up to 74 when gaming. Which is still too high. I mean my computer still restarts from time to time due to overheating. I checked the other temps, and they are all fine(40 degrees max on my gpu). I also have pretty good airflow into my case(2 intake 120mm fans and 2 exhaust 120mm fans), so I don't think that airflow is an issue. Heck I don't think that even the cooler itself is an issue, because apparently it worked good for other buyers. Could it be a faulty CPU? Or maybe another issue?

I do plan to change this CPU, but that will be only this summer. Maybe you guys can help me out, or maybe at least shed some light onto this issue.
 
If you're spiking and rebooting during gaming it could be a couple of factors. Heat, as you're guessing now can be doing that, your max on that chip is 74C. Power can be an issue if you PSU isn't able to handle the increase in load with you GPU. Couple questions.

What is your hardware?
What program are you using to determine your heating issue?
Have you tried reapplying and reseating the cooler?
 
Mobo: MSI FM2-A55M-E33(the memory frequency is the stock one, I didn't OC anything)
CPU(already mentioned) AMD athlon II x4 740, stock speeds
Cooler:Arctic Freezer 7 pro rev.2(coupled with arctic silver thermal paste)
RAM: 8GB DDR3 kingston hyperx fury(1333 mhz)
GPU: MSI Gtx 750ti(it has a small factory OC, but the temps dont go above 45 degrees in full load)
PSU: Superflower SF-500P12N(500W). As I said the PSU is new, and I used to have this issue even before I changed my PSU.

I used both speccy and hwmonitor to determine my temps. They both show the same temperatures so it definetly isn't a program reading issue.

I did this yesterday. No results so far.
 
Firstly, wattage on your system vs PSU looks good. Since you were having this issue before the PSU switched out the chances of it being a PSU failing under load is pretty slim.

Secondly HWMonitor isnt going to give you an accurate reading, take a look here for some info on reading temps for AMD processors.

http://www.tomshardware.com/faq/id-2122665/understanding-temperature-amd-cpus-apus.html

Once you're sure of your temps, if you go in AMD Overdrive and to the logging panel (under the status monitor) you can create a log file of your temps while gaming to see if you're hitting your thermal margin. Your cooler should be more than enough to cool this thing while gaming, and while there are better compounds out there than AS that shouldn't be causing a problem of this scale.

Have you tried stress testing this outside of gaming at all?

 
Ok so this is weird. I used aida64 and it's showing me 0 degrees C. On the other hand the MSI utility(command center) that was recommended in the article that you gave me shows me 34 degrees C.

I'll try to do a logging with the AMD overdrive and come back with some results.
 
Ok so I tested again, this time using AMD overdrive for logging, and the MSI Command center for CPU temp. I used Rise of the Tomb Raider as a benchmark.

Basically the Command Center only showed me that the temp went up to 43 degrees max, and the Overdrive thermal margin had an average value of 56. The lowest that I got was 45. I did save a .txt log, do you want me to post it here?

I forgot to add that I disabled Cool n Quiet and turbo boost, a long time ago. Maybe disabling those 2 things led to this issue?
 
When in doubt with crashes, setting the bios to default is a good idea. Your thermal margin looks good tho. Go ahead and post the log, it cant hurt to see all the info. Have you tried stress testing the system with Prim95 or Intel Burn Test-AVX? These will take any GPU issues out of the equation and look at pure CPU or RAM issues.
 
Here is the log. The last line is where it restarted itself. I'm gonna go ahead and stress test it with prime 95 for a bit and come back with some results.


Sample Core0 Core1 Core2 Core3 TMPIN0 TMPIN1 TMPIN2
0 68.62 68.62 68.62 68.62 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66

828 51.75 51.75 51.75 51.75 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
886 57.25 57.25 57.25 57.25 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
887 58.88 58.88 58.88 58.88 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
888 58.25 58.25 58.25 58.25 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
889 58.25 58.25 58.25 58.25 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
890 56.75 56.75 56.75 56.75 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
891 57.00 57.00 57.00 57.00 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
892 56.62 56.62 56.62 56.62 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
893 55.75 55.75 55.75 55.75 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
894 55.38 55.38 55.38 55.38 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
895 54.88 54.88 54.88 54.88 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
896 56.38 56.38 56.38 56.38 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
897 57.75 57.75 57.75 57.75 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
898 59.25 59.25 59.25 59.25 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
899 59.12 59.12 59.12 59.12 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
900 60.12 60.12 60.12 60.12 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
901 60.62 60.62 60.62 60.62 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
902 59.75 59.75 59.75 59.75 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
903 60.88 60.88 60.88 60.88 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
904 60.62 60.62 60.62 60.62 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
905 61.00 61.00 61.00 61.00 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
906 61.62 61.62 61.62 61.62 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
907 61.38 61.38 61.38 61.38 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
908 60.62 60.62 60.62 60.62 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
909 60.00 60.00 60.00 60.00 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
910 60.25 60.25 60.25 60.25 -274.66 -277.08 -278.66
911 59.38
 
Im currently running prime95 anf everything seems ok. A wild idea passed my mind. What if the GPU's factory oc is unstable? could that be the cause of restarts? And if so, what can i do in order to determine if its the GPU? Can I bring it back to stock clock speeds?
 
There's a good stress tester for your GPU, its called FurMark. Its will heat the hell out of your GPU to find its stability and upper thermal limits so you want to watch the temps on it. The 750ti max temp is 95C so keep an eye out for that.

Also you might want to edit the post with your log. Most of the temps in it are redundant so you don't need the full thing on there and it makes reading the thread a bit of a thing with all the scrolling.

MSI has their MSI Afterburner program that can tweak clock settings, so I'd bet you could try playing with that to see if your OC is unstable or if the fan profile is such that its not pushing enough air to cool things properly.
 
Okay I tested with the heaven benchmark and the highest that it got was 79 degrees. But it did not crash. Still I'll try to reverse the factory OC to see if it crashes again. I head that some games can't handle the GPU oc no matter how stable it is
 
Yeah it sounds like your CPU is solid then with all that testing and temps not going out of control. If it only crashes with games and never with stress tests, I wonder about the video drivers as well. Check for new updates to drivers, maybe firmware and see if you cant lower the OC on the card and try and rule that out.
 
It's not the gpu either. Now I am sure it's the CPU. I remember clearly that when the GPU's OC is under issues, the game crashes to desktop. My pc restarts itself, so it's definetly not because of the GPU. Now when it restarted again I was running ROTTR and my gpu was on stock speeds(i removed the factory OC). I think that HWmonitor and all those programs read temps right. Because what MSI command center is showing me as cpu temp, hw monitor and speccy are showing me as MOBO temps.

Something is not right. And now I am sure that it's the CPU. And yet for some reason it didn't crash when I ran the torture test for 30 mins in prime95. My tests in prime 95 showed how the CPU was pooling at 80+ degrees under full load. Considering that the max temp that it can take is maybe 75... I kinda see the issue.