85 degrees CPU Temp at Idle

I bought Acer Aspire 5720 a couple of months ago and for the past few days it has been shutting down randomly.

Notebook Hardware Control reports that the CPU temperature is at 85 degrees celsius and it's not going down even after idling for an hour. Core temperature however are reported as 35 and 37 degrees. Is that right? My CPU is really overheating or there's some problem with the thermometer?

 

I turned off the notebook and turned it on again after a few minutes. All temperatures are around 50 degrees right now. So I guess I really have an overheating problem. O opened the case and the CPU fan seems to be working properly (albeit a slow...). Any advices on how to solve the problem?

 

if still under warranty take it back.
if not you may need to replace the thermal compound.
Antec Silver Thermal is the best but make sure you read up on how to do it correctly. i do mine once a year just to be sure.
it means pulling your laptop to bits

 

as hoggie states, you probably need to have it cleaned out and/or have the thermal paste replaced on the laptop.

I have never heard of the Antec Silver Thermal...but in all the current thermal paste reviews (yes, there are a few out there) the Arctic Cooling MX-2 leads in temperature differences of about 2C, which is significant. some prefer to use Arctic Silver Ceramique because it's non-conductive (silver thermal compounds usually have some conductivity) and people get nervous with their CPU's not having the heatspreader (I generally don't worry about it as I was introduced to thermal pastes with AMD Atlhon processors which have no heatspreaders). Tuniq's TX-2 is also popular...and, to muddy the waters even more (LOL), there's a diamond based thermal compound floating around out there.

anyhow, get it cleaned out and ask the technicians to replace the original thermal compound on the CPU with some new stuff. if you've got the guts to do this yourself, I would go buy Arctic Coolings MX-2 non-conductive or Tuniq's TX-2 thermal compound. you put a tiny gob about the size of a grain of rice and then smear it around evenly over the core.

GO GET EM!!!

 

a bit over stated there. a simple search will give you a guide on how to do this.

 

but you can't over state the importance of doing it correctly.
with all the right info at your finger tips.

 

Thanks a lot for the replies guys. I'm kind of a DYI guy, so opening the case and applying thermal paste to the CPU isn't a problem. When the problem first started I opened it to clean the insides and check if the cooler was working.

My cooler usually doesn't make a single noise which is strange since other notebooks I have seen are usually very loud when under heavy load. Guess I will have to buy a new one...