Alfered Bie

That may be true, but then how is the sensor able to report accurate ~30 C readings in BIOS?

My CPU will correctly report its temperature in BIOS, but will not report its temperature correctly anywhere within Windows. SpeedFan and CoreTemp report it as 0 degrees Celsius and MSI Afterburner will report its temperature between 90 and 300 degrees. I need my CPU temperature to set my fan curves. Please help. CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1055T Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-880GA-UD3H (rev. 2.2 or 3.0)

The GTX 960 is poor card for the money, and always was. I think its rather stupid to refuse to wait for the RX 480's availability, but if you're going to do that, then the R9 380X is far better than the 960. It really would be wiser to wait though.

The RX 480 is an newer card than the GTX 970, with more vRAM and better DirectX 12 performance. It will *likely* outperform the GTX 970 across the board once AMD releases more optimized drivers, and even in its current state performs slightly better in many games. At $200, it's a better buy than the 970. Waiting for the aftermarket cards is a matter of choice. AMD has officially stated that they will be releasing a software fix for the RX 480's PCI-E power draw issue, so buying a reference board is a non-issue regardless of the quality of your motherboard. If you want better overtclocking performance, wait for the aftermarket cards. If you don't care about that, then don't.

Your best bet is to purchase an RX 480 4GB. It will give you performance on par with the GTX 970 (~$260) and R9 390 (~$290), and it will do it at $200, which is your budget. It's also newer than the other two cards and has better directX 12 performance. The power delivery issue will not affect you if you're running an LGA1151 board. A GTX 960 at $200 was always and still is a relatively poor buy. And with the RX 480, the R9 380 ($200) and 380X ($240) are now completely obsolete. Even if you are unable to buy an RX 480 ASAP, it would be a stupid decision to buy something else because of time. Wait another few weeks if you must for them to come back into stock, it would better than waiting a few years for a GPU upgrade. The 1060 is a bit of a wild card, because it has yet to be released. However, all the evidence points to it being outside of your price range, which makes it illogical to wait for its release.

Within speedfan, which I use to control my fans. Are you guys saying that my reading was inaccurate?

okay, fair enough, but that fails to explain my problem. Did my chip actually get to 108C or not?

yes, but my AMD chip runs above that all the time under reasonable gaming load (about 77 degrees Celsius). Recommended is not maximum.

okay. thanks. That still doesn't explain the lack of thermal throttling though.

Does AMD not consider 108 degrees Celsius "dangerous"?

I would expect it to be something like that.

if the CPU fan's not running, that's likely the motherboard's fault. not the CPU.

Then how are you typing this?

So I was running Prime95 to test how hot my CPU would get. I wanted to know where my threshold is for thermal throttling. I did this with my CPU fan turned off, and I did it on purpose while watching the temperature. I was expecting my CPU to reach maybe 95C and then throttle down the clock speed. My processor is an AMD Phenom II X4 910 that I got secondhand, planning on upgrading regardless of all of this. That's not what happened. My utilization stayed at 100%, and my clock speed stayed at 2.6 Ghz. And my CPU temp just kept going up and up, reaching 108C before i chickened out and killed the process. Is this possible? Is my sensor bad? Or did my chip really reach 108C?

The Surface 3/4 Pro is going to be your best bet. You will have a very hard time doing 3D rendering on an iPad, and you will not be able to run Windows applications. Gaming will be extremely limited on the iPad. Surface seems to be your best bet.