Hey people, I've been having a little trouble, you see I would really like to overclock my CPU, which after reading a number of other forum threads would be fine on stock cooling past 3GHz. The problem is though, my CPU seems to run way hotter than everybody else's on stock cooling. I've read of people getting up to easily past 3GHz on stock cooling barely breaking 60C if even that. But I've been testing mine at stock settings using CPU Stability Test 6.0 and Core Temp 0.99.4, and after about 3 mins of the stability test it settled at around 74C on core1 and 70C on core2. Now I'm worried that if I overclock it's going to run dangerously hot. Does anybody have any suggestions or things to check other than buying a new cooler? If not, then I will likely consider buying one, because it just seems to be running at least 10-20C hotter than everyone else with the exact same setup. Anyway, thanks in advance.

Check the heatsink's four mounting points to see if they are solidly in. If any of them have come loose, it will lose enough contact with the CPU to let it overheat. If any are loose, while you can pop it back in for the time being, you should eventually remove it, clean it, reapply thermal compound and reinstall it.

Alright, thanks for the suggestion.

Wow thanks. I took my puter apart and realized you were right, one of the pins on the cooler actually wasn't attached properly and so I re-did that and after 4 mins of the same stability test, the max temperature has been about 53C, with it hovering around 51-53 on core 1. I'm surprised how much cooler it is now. I haven't re-applied any thermal paste yet, I will have to do that sometime soon, anyway, thanks for your suggestion, it was a great help .

[Update] Okay well now I seem to have a different problem; I can't overclock at all. The temps are fine and everything, but when I went into my BIOS (My mobo is an ASUS P5KR) and set the OC setting to manual, I then set the FSB to 380MHz from 333MHz. Only now when I started it, I got the message saying I need to insert a proper boot device, so I restarted and undid the overclock and it booted fine. So then I went back in and simply set the overclock thing to manual, but left it at stock clock settings and I got the same error that prevented me from even booting. So it seems that something in the BIOS changes when I set the overclock setting to manual. And I really can't be bothered trying to mess with the AI OC settings; I tried one [standard] and I booted and all it had done was underclocked my CPU by about 400MHz.
So, anymore suggestions for this? If you need anymore info, I can give it to you, just ask.

Does your board allow raising the CPU multiplier? I'm only (sort of) familiar with Gigabyte boards and they supply software to overclock and monitor the hardware from within Windows. Doesn't Asus have something like this?

My board does have a setting for the multiplier, but the CPU itself has a locked multiplier. Also I found out about the overclocking software from Asus and I tried it out, but it just does the same thing and I can't boot, which is really irritating me because I have overclocked before and just the way it reacts simply doesn't make any sense.

Okay, well, it all seems to be under control now. It must have been that the overclock settings were somehow affecting the boot device priority because I went back in there, reset the boot priority settings and now I can overclock! Yay! I'm currently running it @ 8x400MHz {3.2GHz} and after a good 4 mins on the stability test, max temp has been 57C, but only briefly.
Anyway, thanks guys for you help.

You're very welcome. Thanks for the feedback.