Core Temperature 161°C Fahrenheit
Core Temperature 161°C Fahrenheit
Hey, a few days back my computer began shutting down unexpectedly. It's an older machine—around six years and still in daily use. I wasn’t doing anything intense when it stopped, just a normal session. When it powered off, the screen went dark with a “no signal” alert, and the GPU fan kicked up to full speed right away, staying at that level until I turned it off. It eventually shut down repeatedly, making it unusable. I found out online it might be due to overheating. On Friday night I cleaned dust from the case, including some buildup on the CPU cooler fins. I also cleared a lot of dust from the GPU and cleaned the fan, then reinstalled it. For a while it worked fine until Saturday when it started shutting down often, even before reaching the screen or login. This happened when I hadn’t used it for hours, so I thought it was overheating. I disassembled it again, cleaned more thoroughly with compressed air, and it seemed to function better afterward—until now. Today I opened it up, removed the GPU, replaced some cables, and moved a faulty SATA cable to a free port. It appears to be running, but hasn’t been used much lately, just booting up an antivirus for about 1½ hours. That’s a positive sign. Still, the CPU core temperature is at 161°C (321°F) according to the screen capture from CPUID HWMonitor. That’s extremely high—far beyond normal operation. I’m worried it might have melted or caught fire. Have you heard of such extreme temps? Is the monitor giving accurate readings? Should I consider applying thermal paste and repositioning the CPU?
I believe the 8350 might not reach that temperature, it could overheat and then shut down abruptly at a cooler setting. I’d consider using alternative tools such as hwinfo or Libre Hardware Monitor to verify the issue. It may simply be a data reporting problem.
I just wanted to let you know about a recent CPU temperature milestone—I hit 193°C. HWInfo didn’t show any such high values, though I’m not sure if the system was running at that point when I recorded the spike from HWMonitor. I’ve confirmed a problem with my GPU as well. After a few hours of use without issues, I tried a game to check for trouble. Immediately the fans got noisier and temperatures rose. I stopped the game right away and restarted it to see how much it would increase. The fans kept getting louder, and the GPU temps climbed to 90°C before I saw colored warnings on the screen for a brief moment, then everything cut out with the GPU still spinning hard. This differs from the random shutdowns I’ve had before; the GPU temperatures during games are normal (around 38°C), but this is clear proof of a GPU issue!
It seems you want to take apart the GPU, replace it, and clean the cooling system.