My CPU is overheating. Help!

[Tino_2]

I have amds athlon x4 860k cpu with its stock cooler. Its been getting at 80°C even with games on low settings. Today I got a new gpu and when I tried to play a game it just overheated after a few minutes. Can someone help?

 

[atomicWAR]

Low setting actually work your CPU harder while high settings work your GPU harder. So turning things down is the last thing you want to do. 80C isn't to hot BTW it's not ideal but wholly acceptable. Anyways turn your settings up on your games until your frame rate drops to what is an acceptable frame rate. Depending on your monitor that could be 60-144Hz but my guess is 60HZ so 60FPS is all you'll need for that set-up. Then also turn on Vsync. This will stop your GPu and CPu from working to hard. That will bring your temps down some but even if it doesn't as stated 80C is ok At the very least turn up the eye candy. It will give your CPU a bit more rest and your GPU more work-out.

 

[lifespill]

Check if the cooler is mount correctly above the cpu and also clean the old paste and reapply a little amount of it.

Does the cooler fan spins?

 

[atomicWAR]

Yes you can also re-apply your thermal paste if you have some laying around and re-mount your cooler. This may or may not help your temps.

 

[Tino_2]

Yeah, its at 100%

 

[atomicWAR]

If your at 100% CPU usage your at a CPU bottleneck. Which brings me back to turning up your in game settings to the max or what ever the GPU can handle. Add filtering and AA say 16x by 8x...that should hurt your GPU plenty and bring the frame rate down if raising the other settings to ultra aren't enough. What refresh rate is your monitor btw?

 

[Tino_2]

60Hz

 

[atomicWAR]

So yeah you want to shoot for 60FPS settings and vsync. Are you running FRAPS? If no get that now. Monitor your frame rate as you turn up the game's settings graphics settings. When you get close but don't go under 60FPS...turn vsync on your system will lock it at 60FPS/hz. So neither CPU or GPU work to hard. As also stated you can turn up filtering and AA to bring down the frame rate while increasing image quality (ie crisp textures and no jagged edges on objects) something like 16x by 8x or 8x by 4x depending on what your GPU can handle. You may need to set them manually in nvidia control panel or AMD crimson control center depending on which GPU you run.

http://www.fraps.com/

 

[Tino_2]

Okay. Thank you.

 

[GhislainG]

MERGED QUESTION
Question from Tino_2 : "CPU overheating 80 degrees"

So my cpu has been hiting the 80 degree mark. I was just casually playing games and it was getting so hot and noisy. Then i rememberd that when i was builiding my pc i didnt take of the plastic wrap on the stock cooler. Can that be the cause of high temps if so how to solve it?

You need to remove the plastic, clean the old thermal paste and apply new paste.

 

[COLGeek]

Remove the plastic protective film (per your other thread).

 

[atomicWAR]

Yeah plastic on the CPU is huge. Take that off, reapply thermal paste to CPU and remount cooler.