Q6600 G0 runs extremely hot @stock

[christophocles]

I have a Q6600 G0 stepping and it runs extremely hot all of the time. At stock clocks and the lowest possible volts my MB will allow (1.125v), this thing IDLES at 55*C and with Prime95 Small FFTs on all 4 cores it goes up past 80*C! With everything in the MB set to Auto and with SpeedStep turned on, the thing is sitting here running at 1.6Ghz, 1.032v, idling at 47*C (hottest core in realtemp).

Also there is about a 10*C difference between Cores 1&2 and cores 3&4 when under load. I have tried both a Thermalright Ultra 120 extreme and a Scythe Ninja cooler, and I have reseated them both many times with Arctic Silver 5 with the same results. I put in a Xeon3060 (e6600) with the Scythe cooler just as a quick test and it idled around 28*C with 50*C max temp running Small FFTs.

Do I just have an extremely bad Q6600 G0? I've read on here that 3.6ghz overclock @1.4vcore is with a 55*C load temp is common. I can't even reach those kinds of temps with stock settings. I have not tried lapping the CPU because I am hesitant to void the warranty, but I still don't think that would help with my exceedingly high temperatures at low vcore. Funny thing is, I tried overclocking a bit and it seemed like it wanted to. I reached 3.0+ at maybe 1.15v and the only thing holding me back was the scary temperature. I've never had a problem with it crashing on me under any conditions, even running prime95 @80+ degrees C (which I turned off immediately).

My room isn't too crazily hot, either. I keep the A/C running so it's probably in the high 20's. I love this noisy beast other than the fact that I can't overclock it AT ALL. I'm thinking I should just sell this proc. and buy a Q9450 or a used Q6600 that I KNOW will run properly, but I'm holding out to see if there is any hope for this one.

Could it be a faulty temp. sensor reading high all the time? Has anyone else experienced this?

My specs:
C2Q Q6600 G0 @ 2.4ghz
8gb G.Skill RAM
ASUS P5W64 WS Pro
ATI Radeon HD4850 512MB
Westinghouse 37w3se 1080p 37" LCD
6x 1TB Seagate 7200.11 32mb cache
Areca ARC-1220 SATA-II RAID Controller
-300GB RAID-0 Volume (OS)
-3.7TB RAID-6 Volume (Data)
Zippy Emacs 850w PSU