Quote Originally Posted by unclewebb View Post
The Test Sensors applies an equal load to all 4 cores and then compares the core temperature you started at to the core temperature you ended up at. If your 4 cores are equal at idle and 3 of them go up by 14 degrees and one of them only goes up by 8 then that is a sign that something isn't quite right with your core2 sensor. The typical problem is that core2 is getting stuck at idle so even if the core temperature gets cooler, this core will continue to report the same temperature.

To look for this I start by turning on the Log feature of RealTemp and I set it to an interval of 1 second. Let your computer idle for a minute so you can get some baseline data, then run Prime95 small FFTs on all 4 cores for a couple of minutes and then stop that and let your computer idle again for a minute or two. Stop RealTemp and have a look at the log file.

When Prime starts, the core temps should start increasing on all of your cores by a more or less equal amount. When you stop running Prime, the opposite should occur on each core. When a sensor is stuck, as the CPU cools down some of the cores will be decreasing at a similar rate while as your CPU continues to cool, one sensor will stop moving and will continue to report the same temperature even while the other cores are still reporting that they are cooling down.

This isn't a big problem but it's something you need to be aware of. If the sticking point is at 40C then that sensor will never be able to report a temperature less than that. As long as you know that, it's not really a problem. Above the sticking point, most of these sensors work fine and it won't limit the ability of a processor to overclock or anything like that.

Send me a log file of the above test if you're not sure what it's telling you. In CSV format would be nice.
Thanks, i'll try that tonight. Generally my idle temps are 32,32,36,25 so i wonder if they should actually be 32,32,32,25