Computer runs at 55-60 degrees idle

[Eredell]

Hey

My computer is running at 60 degrees C when its pretty much idle.
When I try to install something or work it to much it will jump to 70, and I'm believing this is what is causing it to shutdown.

I have one 120mm intake fan on the side, and on outtake in the back..is this really not enough to keep my computer cool?

Thanks 

[soybean]

Tell us more about your hardware components.  What all do you have in there?  Have you ever removed the heatsink from the CPU?  If so, did you remove the old thermal compound and apply a new layer of thermal compound to the processor before remounting the heatsink?  Do you periodically clean dust out of it?  Is air flow obstructed from getting into the computer by surrounding objects? 

[neo.cerberus]

Ive got a similar problem. what kind of computer do you have?

Are your fans running properly? How about dust? it can get very dusty if the computer is over a year old. Clearing out the fans and heatsinks can drastically cool your system. Also have you added any new hardware recently like hard drives or a new gfix card? perhaps a new power source?

mine is a dell dimension 8400 and I am probably going to move the guts to a new case to improve airflow. My case now (the one it came with from dell) doesnt have a spot for a front fan and only has a 92mm rear fan. I am going to buy a new case that has a front 80mm and a rear 120mm so air can get in and out more efficiently and the heat will go with it. I'm not suggesting you do this, just saying this is what I plan on doing.

Here is a link to a program called "SpeedFan" it will tell you various temperatures like ambient/local/hd0/hd1 and depending on your motherboard may be able to set/change your fan speed
http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

[Eredell]

System:
Pentium 4 3.2 GHz
GPU:7600gt
RAM:1gig
MB:P5N-E SLI
Rosewill 550w



Its a new computer I just built. I made sure that there was enough thermal compound and what not. There is no dust, considering I just built it

[neo.cerberus]

Are you overclocking components?

[Eredell]

negative

[Eredell]

Right now I am installing WoW, and I can just see the temps sky rocket.

[neo.cerberus]

last thing i can think of is connections between the processor and its heatsink. sure you put enough paste on it? maybe the case is too small?

Also is svchost.exe taking up a lot of memory all the time? if you just built the compy its likely that you havent yet installed the updates. there was a memory leak in windows updater a while back that was fixed with a patch later on. When i reformatted and re-updated my computer ran veryhot because svchost was always taking up like 99% of the resources for a long period of  time. if this is the problem jsut let windows update run overnight and eventually it will finish upgrading and the leak will be fixed.

[touchstone57]

I found that fans inside the case will not much affect the CPU temp, as that is the job of the CPU fan.

I bought a lot of fans in the hope to lower my CPU temp but it did nothing of the sort, well we all learn from our mistakes 

Perhaps you got a cheap CPU with a bad fan/heatsink?

[Eredell]

Trust me, the case is huge 
Perhaps... is it possible I put too much thermal paste?

[soybean]

Perhaps you should read a good reference such as How To Correctly Apply Thermal Grease and re-apply the thermal paste.

[GX1_Man]

Too much is as bad as not enough.