It seems like the temperatures I'm getting on my new Phenom 9950 (125w) are on the high side.

I've got a Zalman 9700 (fan at 1700RPM) on it, and the CORE temperatures aren't HIDEOUS-- they're comparable to the ones of my E6750 with stock cooler (peaking just shy of 60C, idling down in the mid 30s)
But what's strange is the "CPU" temperature sensor of the motherboard.

According to the vendor-supplied software (Asus PC Probe II), it's consistently significantly higher than the core temperature (as reported by Core Temp 0.99.3) -- at idle, the core is 34-37C, while the "CPU" sensor never dips below 40C. Putting it on an OCCT load cycle, after about 9 minutes, the core temperature hits 57c-58c, but the "CPU" temperature trips an alarm at 65c and I panic.

Now, call me wacky, but under normal practice, the CPU core temperature should be higher than any other means of finding the CPU temperature (a probe right in the VRM might be higher, but that's another tale)

And this is with a premium cooler. If I slapped the cute little "actually more wimpy than the one which came with my S939 4600+" stock cooler back on, I can't imagine not regularly tripping the 65c flag.

Actually, because of the annoying loudness, I'm considering if I want to try rebuilding the old GeminiII with AC AF12025PWM fan on top.

Any thoughts?

I wonder if maybe the airflow patterns of a "tower" heatsink (or the similarly laid out Zalman) fail to cool whatever is the CPU sensor.

I recall in the old days, my Abit AV8 was famous for having two different interpretations of CPU temperature, which shifted back and forth for no obvious reason, and were like 20c different, so maybe it's just lame firmware.

Every temperature monitoring program I've tried reports differently. I just use Core Temp as a guide. I know my average temps with it and so long as they stay consistent I don't worry about them or the actual number.

Measuring CPU temps is a rather dark art, but basically if nothing shuts down/explodes you're probably OK.

CoreTemp is accepted by most as the best piece of software. RealTemp is also rather good. I suggest you ignore the Asus software.

Speedfan works good too, I run it for the monitoring parts. You can have it record a week at whatever interval and then make a chart in excel.

CoreTemp has always been flaky if you ask me, Smart Guardian (came with the lanparty boards) always matched up with speedfan, but coretemp was always different. Now these were older chips. The quad core chips are a lot newer and I'm pretty sure coretemp was made to show there four cores and temps for each.


You could always get a hardware temp moniter and slide it under the base of the cooler...