I have been using my Phenom II 1055t for almost a year now. In the beginning, the stock fan was running loud, so i bought what i thought was an upgrade. When i recently upgraded my GFX card to a 560 Ti, i noticed some problems(huge frame drops and performance issues, in retrospect this was the cpu throttling). Being the huge noob to computers that i was, i seeked help from some more knowledged friends. They told my to check all my temps on my hardware (using CPUID HWmonitor, which could be a few degrees colder than it actually was), and it turns out that my Phenom was running red hot. My sensors were reading 66 C, but it may have been even hotter. i looked in my case, and the heatsink had a cake of dust on it >.< after cleaning it off, i got my idle temps to around 40 C, but under stress it still gets to be around 62-3 C. When i play games like BC2, the framerate stutters and is almost never smooth. I know the max temp is 62, so i have a few questions. 1: how damaged is my CPU? i know there is no way for anyone here to know, but what kind of damage would running it that hot for a good 2 weeks be? (for all i know it could have been running this hot for months) I am a complete noob, so anything will be news to me. also, should i try and buy a new cooler? or just scrap this processor and buy a new one? i'm not sure what the damage is, and if i can i would like to attempt to save this processor (i'm almost broke). My last question is: should i run games with my case open until i get a new cooler? i know it will increase dust buildup and shorten the life of my fans, but i want to game until i can save up for a new fan/processor (Keep in mind i'm 16 and unemployed, the only money i make is painting fences XD) thanks for the help ahead of time, and sorry for making you want to pull your hair out on account of my stupidity and inability to keep my hardware cool.

EDIT: would lowering the clocks via the BIOS keep the temp down? how would one do that?

also, for playing games, it seems my processor cannot keep up (maybe do to damage from overheating, or it reaching max operating temps currently) as in the gameplay stutters, meaning (maybe, i dont know) that the processor cannot keep up with rendering the frames. would lowering the framerate (Via VSYNC) or changing the max prerendered frames help? the default in the Nvidia panel is 3 frames for max prerendered, should i change that?

Edited: 08/20/2011 at 01:52 AM by Deadlysnowcone

It's highly unlikely that you have damaged your 1055T.
If you did, it probably wouldn't even allow you to post, let alone boot into Windows.
We all learned some new info in how to read AMD CPU temps here:

http://forums.amd.com/forum/me...=153804&enterthread=y

If you reached 90C on any core temp, the 1055T would have gone into thermal shutdown.
AMD states a max. operating "core" temp of 62c with it's Phenom II CPU's.
As you can see, this threshold (62c) leaves a huge margin of safety.

Take your case side panel off and then monitor your CPU temp.
If you see improvement with it off, then you need to improve your case airflow.

Here is an excellent guide on how to properly configure BFBC2:

http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=1106849

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