Right, by way of background, here is my current system.
CPU: AMD A8-3870K with stock heat sink, not overclocked
RAM: 12.0GB DDR3
Motherboard: Gigabyte A55M-S2HP
Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 760
Operating System: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit SP1
All in a Bitfenix Survivor with 2 x 120 intake, 1 x 120 exhaust and 1 x 200 exhaust.
Now the issue, after my computer has been turned on for a while and done something relatively intense, gaming or some plex media encoding, my CPU temp will return to normal but will jump up 10C for no apparent reason.
I noticed this after hearing my fan randomly ramp up. Upon closer inspection there is no change in CPU utilisation and it's nearly a perfect 10C every time. Then it starts happening in quick succession, so the temps will have only just returned to there normal idle spot when it happens again, and it seems to build so that eventually the fan has to really crank it. These temps are measured by HWMonitor.
I'm in the process of putting together a new machine and this one will be relegated to some kind of server (and I will change heatsinks at that point) but it's still very annoy and very curios.
I thought it may have been the thermal compound finally needs replacing but is that an excuse for the described issue? It seems like an intermittent problem, where as degrade thermal compound would give a fairly consistent issue.
Any thoughts people?