CPU temperature monitor error

Is it particularly common for the temperature monitors to fail and give false readings? Lately mine has been reading >70°C almost all the time, regardless of the load. The system temperature is 36°C and is much cooler than it used to be before i added an additional fan.

I know my processor temperature always used to be on the high side (50-60) from what i recall, but 70 is excessive in my opinion

I have a abit AX8 mother board and an AMD 3500+

For cooling i have a 2x12cm fans (one intake flowing over the 3 harddrives, one exhaust out the back). I also have 1x8cm exhast roughly over the cpu.

Have you cleaned the case out recently, especially the CPU heatsink and fan?

nope, but there isn't much dust buildup, although i have realised that the program i was using to read the temperature doesn't update when a certain window is up, so the temperature has dropped down to 60 when idle....still rather high in my opinion.

Well it is quite common for temperature control software to give false readings.. To be honest, I have no idea what would work with your amd system, I just know that both TAT (intel's temperature control thingy) and Coretemp seem fairly accurate for me while SpeedFan and others (including the motherboard monitoring program) are broadly mis-presenting my temperatures!

So have a look around to see what the best software would be for your system, sorry that I can't help more than that :)

np, thanks for your advice