Temperature and other questions

[Goobley]

Hi all,
I'm running an athlon II x3 450 with its fourth core unlocked (stock speed 3.2 GHz), and with a coolermaster TX3 (I know, I should have bought the 212+) and I'm finding my idle temperatures unusually high (I live in southern-ish France with a current air temp of about 26°C, getting up to about 35-40°C on the hottest days.

When I cold boot my machine after 8 hours switched off, my temp is in the 32-33°C range and after however long I want of prime95 (have run it for 48hours) it is fixed at 55°C. After closing p95 the temp drops back down to 45°C where it stays due to me using a quiet fan setting in my bios (if cputemp < 45°C then lower fanspeed)

IIRC, when i built and tested my computer in the early part of this year (mid-march I believe), it idled and 26-28° and ran at 50° under full load, is this normal summer behaiviour for this sort of system, and I presume that there is no headroom for overclocking?

I have thought that since I'm not playing the most core demanding games (cod6, civilization V and Shogun 2 along with a few things like DA:O) I might be better returning to 3 cores and OC'ing.
However I also use this computer as a linux based maths calculation station and run 5 threads at once (4cpu-1gpu). However If i get a 25+% OC the difference should be negligible, right?

I think my airflow is decent: 120mm intake and exhaust with a 220mm exaust on the side.

Since there's a savage wall of text, the main points are:
are these temps normal with said fan (TX3)?
If not, how can it be remedied?
Is 4core stock better that 3 core OC?
Thanks
Chris

[GoNz0]

quite normal, temps dont go up at the same rate as the room temp.

[Sputnik]

you could check your CPU voltage to see if it is correct some motherboards seem to over volt the CPU.

Like Gonzo said, The temps are about right. Mine runs at 6-7*c above ambient when Idle. I'm pretty sure the cores max temperature is somewhere around 70*c.

[Goobley]

Thanks guys, voltage is a standard 1.4. I won't worry about it then, just wanted to be sure that I wasn't over frying my silicone.
Chris