I & my father just recently put together a new PC. Specs below.

From the very beginning, on boot it will often complain that the CPU is too hot. If I sit in BIOS and watch the CPU, it'll drop back down from red to blue (<72C), at which point I've tended to just boot into Windows...and haven't had any problems. In fact, I've played a couple hours straight of Skyrim at max settings, and not had any visible issues.

That said, I've occasionally walked away & come back to find that it's crashed. Yesterday, it crashed (while idle) twice in 12 hours, which shifted the balance from busy-with-life to nervous-I'm-about-to-melt-something.

I just installed Core Temp which is showing my 4 cores fluxuating between 70-98C.

I'm guessing at this point that the CPU fan may be incorrectly installed or defective. My first thought is to either (a) add water cooling (which the case supports) and / or (b) replace the CPU fan with an after-market one. That said, I'm very open to suggestions. A note, while I certainly don't want to burn money here, I have a baby coming any day now and am still unpacking from a recent move so if I have a choice between an option that costs money and another that takes a while...I'll happily spend a bit extra.

Side question: Should I be nervous to even have this on at this point?

Let me know if there's something useful I could add to my report. Otherwise, I'm looking forward to your suggestions! Thanks.

CPU

• Intel i7-2600 CPU w/ stock fan

Other HW

• ASUS P8Z68-V Pro motherboard
• 64G SSD boot drive
• 4 older SATA HDs
• GIGABYTE ATI Radeon HD6950 1 GB DDR5
• 8G Kingston T1 Series RAM
• Corsair 650W Gold Certified power supply
• Antec P280 case