Recently, my mother managed to freeze my gaming PC while doing nothing but shopping for shoes online. Having experienced problems in the past with overworked parts, I played it safe and shut the rig down, refusing to boot it back up until morning when I could deal with it. My first guess (mostly out of panic, again, from past experiences) was that cat hair had gotten into the fans and was causing overheating issues. Most likely it was just a random Windows XP bug, but I wanted to be sure. Ultimately, I ended up testing the rig's temperature, which is a stable 50 C when idle. Speed Fan shows a green checkmark on 49- C for both the GPU and the CPU, but as soon as it hits fifty, replaces said checkmark with a roaring inferno, easily enough to spark my paranoia.
Anyways, I found this odd for two reasons:
A: I hadn't expected a Dual Core 2200 and GeForce 9600 get this hot at normal, non-overclocked speeds.
C: I had always assumed safety unless you start hitting 65+ degrees. Is it supposed to be substantially less than 50? If not, why the hell is that fire there on speedfan?
So my question is, does anyone else find this to be odd/unnerving?
Edit: It does not idle and game at the same temperature, as previously thought. My speedfan was glitching out.
