Intel Q9300 overheating with stock fan.

[idata]

I purchased this processor in the beginning of the year and I never reach stability under load. I always used stock speed and the stock fan that came with the processor. I got always a complete system freeze after a period of heavy load between 10 min and 1 hour. My ambient temperature is 25 degrees C. My idle temperature are between 40-50 C (confirmed by latest bios, speedfan, realtemp) and my 100 % load temperature reach 60-70 in 10 min, after 20 min, it can be over 75 but I never seen 80 since the system will freeze.

I know that my memory is stable. My graphic card (eVGA 8800 GTS 640 MB) is not the problem also (I tried another card and still have the issue). My chassis is heavily ventilated, I'm using a Antec P182 with 2 more fan as intake and everything as high RPM. My motherboard is Asus P5N-D with the optional northbridge fan installed. I know the problem is hardware since the stability problems occur under vista 32 bits, linux and windows 7 RC1.

I'm now 90% sure that the stock fan is purely inadequate for this CPU. It was perfectly installed at the origin and I recently clean everything and reapply thermal paste using exactly the Arctic Silver procedure. The heatsink/fan is perfectly sitted. Finally, I got the exact same temperature problem.

Now I decided to order a quality CPU cooler because I'm so tired to crash. I chose the Noctua NH-U12P and had to pay $79 more just to get the hope to reach stability at stock speed. Why Intel shipped this CPU with an inadequate cooler? Normally I would expect at least some kind of stability from an expensive CPU. I'm really disappointed. What step should I take next?

[idata]

The intel fans thacomw with the processors are not verry good at keeping them cool so i would go with the new one and if you have artic silver 5 thermal paste thats great! if you install the cpu cooler and you dont get any better results try resetting the cmos this will hopefully get rid of any issues by resetting the bios to its origanal state! if this dosnt work try going to a pro like geek squad!

Best of luck

Billy Babin