PECI Temperatures

[alexwalter88]

My problem is that I'm getting significantly different temperatures when PECI is turned on or off. I'm using SpeedFan and Everest to record temps.

With peci ON my idle cpu temp is 13 and load is 51
With peci OFF my idle temp is 31 and load is 68

13 seems too low considering the room temperature is probably about 18, but 68 seems too high for load on stock clocks. So, which temperatures should I trust?

Also, my BIOS is reporting 32 with peci on and 34 with it off

I've never actually had any problems with my computer turning off or anything because of overheating, but 68 troubles me. Especially considering I have a decent HSF.

 

[mrlithium]

with PECI on your temps are reading on average ~15C below what they should be
with PECI off they are accurate, so you should leave it disabled

 

[mrlithium]

zalman is only "decent" but 68 degrees is kind of troubling. so if i were you, i'd go through the time and hassle of removing your zalman and examining the condition of the thermal paste. a common mistake is to put way too much on. If you have glops of goo dangling after you took it off, its too much, it should be a small enough amount so that once the heatsink is installed for the first time, the paste spreads out evenly around the entire chip and with a perfect application there is no paste leftover after this spreading effect. sometimes the pressure is uneven and it squeezes the paste to either one side of the chip or another.
after you removed the heatsink, clean the hell out of it with rubbing alcohol and start over, try a slightly different method of application so you can see if the problem lies in the paste. if the paste is fine, next thing to check would be that you're not overvolting your CPU somehow (!?) i think youd realize this though, so in all likelyhood its the paste. then check airflow in the case. you may be surprised what a good wire-cleanup will do for temps.

 

[alexwalter88]

Thanks for the suggestions. Theres a couple of things I forgot to mention:

My computer is 4 months old and not long ago I did a simple overclock to 3ghz. If the 68 temp is accurate on stock temps, then overclocked I should've easily gotten up to the 72 max temperature. But since I wasn't checking temps at that point I don't know for sure. If indeed it actually got to 72 then my computer should've shut off or lowered the frequency, right? But that has never happened in 4 months of playing games and using other processor intensive programs, and its the winter right now so it would have gotten even hotter.

Also, unlike my previous computer, this one was built by NCIX so if they installed the HSF wrong then that is not good on their part. And as of right now my case isn't too messy in terms of wires and it has a lot of fans, all intaking and exhausting correctly.

And finally, an idle of 31 and a load of 68 is a 37 degree difference, which seems like quite a lot compared to the temps of other people's I've seen.