Water system error

[Spartacus51]

I put a water cooling system together a few weeks ago, and in the beginning it was an extremely ghetto system, but I've made quite a few improvements. I made a new waterblock, a simple cross drilled, but I made sure to make the right holes and all, so there are channels right over the core, and overall felt it was a good block. Except when I put it on my temps only dropped a degree from a serious ghetto copper cap block. I know I'm pulling air through my rad, I can feel the air moving behind it. The rad has a fairly good shroud, and I can't really find any dead spots. So to me this indicates pump, which is nothing but a cheap submersible petsmart aquarium pump. It's rate 310 GPH, and while I'm sure I'm not getting anywhere close to that I thought it would be sufficient. I did notice when leak testing that the block warmed up after awhile with the pump and now rad, but it wasn't real warm. The other thing I've noticed is my temp reading is always around 50, whether I've got everything closed except Asus Probe or I'm running Winamp, online and folding. This was true with my old block, and also my stock HSF. Is there more of a problem with my monitoring, or is the problem in my cooling system?

 

[Diggrr]

I'd say the monitoring is at fault.
Under the cpu, there's a little (sometimes) blue thingy...that's the thermister that gives the motherboard the temp reading.
Did you bend it upward slightly, so that re-installing the processor pushed it back down? (this keeps firm contact with the chip's backside). You can also use a dab of thermal goo on it to help accuracy somewhat.

If it's bent down, and not touching the cpu's backside, then you're really just measuring the air temp in the socket cavity...this won't change much with loading and unloading of the cpu.

The second thing to check is whether the monitoring program has the correct settings...go to the software maker's website for assistance here.
For instance, motherboard monitor uses via686b-3 for the cpu temps on my board (KT7A-Raid), yours maybe different.