Processor incredibly Hot, what to do

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The thermal paste looks ok. Try this.

1. Reset your bios. Do this by:
Turning off the PC and pulling the power cord out.
Take the silver, coin-shaped battery out of the motherboard and press the power button a few times
Put the battery back in, plug the power cord back in.

2. Check the fan on the heatsink is plugged in. So take the side of the case off, start the computer, and have a look and make sure it's definitely spinning.
 
Make sure you clean both the heatsink and the CPU before applying new thermal paste. I use Goo Gone or a similar cleaning solution to wipe the old paste off the chip and heatsink until both have a shiny, paste free surface. Then re-insert the chip in the motherboard and apply a small amount of thermal paste and spread it thin to cover the entire area that the heatsink presses up against. Then in one solid try, press the heatsink straight down onto the paste and clip the four locking clips, try not to let the heatsink slide around while you're clipping it in because it can mess with the paste and smear it around or make it uneven. Make sure the fan is plugged into the CPU fan 4-pin connector and power on your PC to the BIOS. Check the temps in BIOS (CPU temperature is listed under PC Health) and make sure your voltage is set within a normal range (for the stock heatsink I wouldn't recommend over 1.2V or so unless your chip is unstable, mine ran hot on the stock cooler even when undervolted, it hovered around 75C board CPU temp (cores were probably above 80) under full load. If the voltages have been messed with, try loading the defaults to clear any voltage modification. There is a green LED above the red one that indicates a slight CPU over-voltage (mine is lit, running at 1.31V), that should not be on when using stock cooling.

If you can, I would recommend buying a better heatsink, I used the stock one for a month and decided it wasn't very good for 24/7 folding and I wanted to overclock, so I switched to a Corsair H50 water-cooler. There are many cooling options (air and water both) that work well for the i7, you should consider a better cooling solution if your temps stay high. The stock cooler should not run anywhere near that high under no load though, mine ran about that temp under 100% on all cores load. With the H50 and 1.31V/4.12GHz, my cores run around 70-75C and the board's CPU temp is around 67-72C depending on room temperature, the red light is sometimes on (the red light turns on when the board temp is above 70C).
 
The cpu fan is plugged in, and there is a green light on and a red light. So I guess the next thing I will do is reset it by taking the battery out like you said. Can you link me a nice heat sync? I really hope nothing is physically wrong that is making it over heat
 
I just tried to get into the bios but every time i try the pc shuts off before I can get into the bios and save any thing or even check the voltage
 
hmmmm something very wrong is going on there.

Take out all but one of your ram sticks.
If you touch the side (near the bottom) of your heatsink, does it feel very hot?
 
If the heatsink is getting hot that means the thermal paste is probably good. If it is still overheating I would assume the voltage is too high. Have you re-seated the CPU? Also, do you have all the PSU lines hooked up (24 pin ATX and 8 pin CPU power)? If you have a multimeter (voltage meter) use it to measure the voltage of your power supply (most importantly the 12V rail, black is ground and yellow is 12V). It could be the PSU voltage going too high. It could also be a component on the motherboard failing (capacitor or inductor most likely, they filter the CPU power).
 
I took the processor out and put it back in when i was testing everything, yeah the 24 and the 8 pin is in the motherboard but i don't have a PSU voltage meter, i can't go into the bios to check because the pc shuts off. I don't understand it went from running hot to not even letting me boot.
 
Ok. Sounds like the bios has incorrectly configured the voltage settings for the CPU, resetting the BIOS should have helped there...strange...

edit: actually, DID you get around to resetting the BIOS? Make sure you leave the battery out of the motherboard for about 3-5 minutes, or at least make sure you press the power button a few times while the battery is out.
 
No i didn't take the battery out, I went into the bios and hit load default settings. THat wouldn't do the same thing?

Another thing I noticed was that all the led lights on the motherboard come on now, I don't know if they always did that when it first boots up but they stay on up until the pc shuts off. So does that reinforce the idea of voltages being wrong?
 
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