SpeedFan 4.33, AUX temp? A little help please (OC'd Q6600 content, ish)

[Eulogy]

Hey all,
Have the rig in my sig below... nothing "great" by means of the norm around here, but it gets me where I'm going.
When I fire up SpeedFan after OCing to 3.2 (VCore is 1.32 in BIOS), it shows a nice red flame next to "AUX", with a temp readout of about 66C.
When I Prime 95, this shoots up to ~77C. That was after 10 minutes.
I'm using a Corsair 550VX PSU. This was my first guess as to what it might think is over temp.
I didn't want to kill anything... so I shut down. Popped open the case (good ventilation etc. here). I put my hand on my HSF, and it was hardly even warm. I put my hand on the PSU, hardly even warm. The videocard was the warmest part in the whole case, by a good margin. NB/SB felt fine.
Core 1&2 are showing temp of 25C on idle, up to 41C when loaded (with my 3.2 OC). Cores 3&4 are about 2-3 degrees warmer.
RAM is 1.9V (within Spec for my G.Skill), and running @ 850 (rated for 800) @ 5-5-5-15. Though again, RAM wasn't really even warm to the touch.

So, I'm stumped. I'm sure that the put-your-hand-on-it-and-see-how-hot-it-is test isn't excatly scientific or definite, but I would've thought that it would've provided SOME insight on to what's going on? Does anyone know what temp this is supposed to be?

Just kind of curious, as I want to work on this OC (shooting for 3.6, so I can run 1:1 RAM and all that fun stuff!) and get it stable. But this high temp has be a bit concerned.

Edit:
My HSF is the Thermaltake Ultra 120 Extreme with a Scythe SFF21E fan pushing, and a very nearby 120mm thermaltake pulling (hardly enough room between HSF and exhaust fan to get my fat hand in there).
Also, case has pretty clean wiring and very nice airflow. No real stagnant spots or anything.

 

[jyi786]

You've got a good HSF there, so there are a few possibilities.

1. You mounted the HSF wrong. Take it off and remount it again, making sure that it is centered over the PSU. Also make sure you use quality thermal paste like Arctic Silver or Ceramique. Follow the thermal paste instructions you would find on their website: http://www.arcticsilver.com/instructions.htm

2. Either the HSF or the surface of your CPU is convex or concave. If this is the case, you're going to have to lap them, although I wouldn't necessarily recommend it.

3. Change the pull configuration to push on the HSF. According to a review I saw somewhere, I think Anandtech, the best config was a push, not pull. If you have the HSF direction facing toward the rear of your case, your rear chassis fan should do the "pulling" work. No reason to burden the CPU fan with that.

I just now noticed that I wasted all my time writing that, because it looks like the temps for your CPU is fine... Thursday morning blues. Oh well. I'll post this anyway since I wrote it.

Anyhow, about that AUX thing? Don't worry about it. All newer motherboards have that AUX temp sensor built into the motherboard, so it shows the internal temp for the board itself. It's nothing you should be worried about, so just ignore it, or disable it from Speedfan. Speedfan is known to have a buggy implementation regarding that sensor, or vice versa. As a matter of fact, on my Asus P5K Deluxe, it shows a temp of 122C.

So bottom line, it's nothing to worry about. Now, about the heat transfer. Your HSF should actually be warm to the touch when the CPU is being loaded; this way, you know that the HSF is doing the job. If it's not, I'd be very suspect about one of the possibilities I mentioned earlier.

 

[Eulogy]

You've got a good HSF there, so there are a few possibilities.

1. You mounted the HSF wrong. Take it off and remount it again, making sure that it is centered over the PSU. Also make sure you use quality thermal paste like Arctic Silver or Ceramique. Follow the thermal paste instructions you would find on their website: http://www.arcticsilver.com/instructions.htm

2. Either the HSF or the surface of your CPU is convex or concave. If this is the case, you're going to have to lap them, although I wouldn't necessarily recommend it.

3. Change the pull configuration to push on the HSF. According to a review I saw somewhere, I think Anandtech, the best config was a push, not pull. If you have the HSF direction facing toward the rear of your case, your rear chassis fan should do the "pulling" work. No reason to burden the CPU fan with that.

I just now noticed that I wasted all my time writing that, because it looks like the temps for your CPU is fine... Thursday morning blues. Oh well. I'll post this anyway since I wrote it.

Anyhow, about that AUX thing? Don't worry about it. All newer motherboards have that AUX temp sensor built into the motherboard, so it shows the internal temp for the board itself. It's nothing you should be worried about, so just ignore it, or disable it from Speedfan. Speedfan is known to have a buggy implementation regarding that sensor, or vice versa. As a matter of fact, on my Asus P5K Deluxe, it shows a temp of 122C.

So bottom line, it's nothing to worry about. Now, about the heat transfer. Your HSF should actually be warm to the touch when the CPU is being loaded; this way, you know that the HSF is doing the job. If it's not, I'd be very suspect about one of the possibilities I mentioned earlier.

I was also concerned about the HS not being too warm to the touch. It was above room temp, and definitely was taking heat off the proc. This is also evident from the core temps being low. If I was having trouble with the proc overheating, I'd consider all of those options (and, honestly, would've explored them previous to my posting).
I also just read that you have to add 15C to SpeedFan, so that means under full load I was running about 56C, which seems to be the norm or so for that OC.
I also have the fan that's mounted on the HS in "push" mode, with the exhaust fan on the case doing the "pulling". The amount it's pulling is probably marginal, as the gap between the HS and exhaust fan is probably 2.5".

As long as it's not something to worry about, cool, I'll continue on then. I just got worried when I saw that red flame.

I'll look for more input on the matter before continuing, though. I like being as thorough as I can .

Thanks for the reply.