palomino temperature..

I am in somewhat of a pickle.. I just installed 2 more case fans to effectively drop my temp to 26C.. For about 2 weeks my system ran at 26C case and 47C cpu idle, 53C load.. All of a sudden last night I checked my temperatures (I do all the time) and my case temp is 28C (acceptable) but my cpu is now at a steady 57C idle.. After playing a game for a few minutes its at 64C, and after running Prime95 for only 6 minutes it hits 70C at which point my computer shuts down (my software sensor is set to shut down computer at 80C so I haven't figured out why it shut down at 70, perhaps in my bios??) What in the world is going on? I checked my fans, they all seem to be working fine, including CPU fan.. the only thing I can think of is the thermal paste, I think it may be missing now, lol.. thanx for any info.

EDIT: right now the cpu temp at idle is 59C (well, not truly idle, but really, all I am running is one window of IE to post here).. this is getting crazy..

I am on stock cooling, but my problem is that this just happened in the last 2 days, and I am at a loss.

make shure the heat sink has not shifted is not full of fluff probly not tho since you checked the fans.
you may also need to reaply the T.M.I. if its old and dryed up it insulates the chip like u said.

It could very well be the thermal paste/compound.. in fact I think I have absolutely none on there.. When I replaced my mobo and installed everything again, I did not reapply any of it.. But still the chip ran at 47C idle for 2 weeks, it just shot up to 57C idle in the past two days..

And as I said, Prime95 makes it crash completely, even though the chip is not overclocked at all, and my case temp is very low (26-28C).. I'll have to go grab some Arctic silver, but then I am also in the lookout for a dlt3c..

Do you know what kind of temperature rise is normal for running Prime95? it seems high to me, the temp just kept on rising when I ran it.

btw, does your mobo support pci/agp lock or are you running on overclocked pci/agp bus?

No that duallie isn't locked but I assume his mobo can handle it - it does overclock the PCI bus though - @ 36MHz.

With my stock Pally + stock AMD HSF temps went through the roof when running Prime95 - 70-72 was not uncommon. That was with an XP2000 though. This was AFTER removing the crappy wax pad and reapplying crappy white thermal goop

i would code higher multiplyers but one chip is a tbread-a and my voltages are daft atm.
Iv ran these pci and agp cards at 38 mhz before or more i once had an fsb of 155mhz cant remember wat that made the pci about 40 i think.
running prime does not rise my temps as theay are @ load with seti and folding. dont know what idel temperatures are. (im not at home to find out.)
just read a magazine review where the chip hit 81*C!!! it was a barton 2500+ i wnat to know how on earth they managed that.
isnt that more than the maximum chip temp??

edit: have you tryed the paste again.
just a thought could your clip be losing its tension?