Quote Originally Posted by Aske001 View Post
It's amazing the faith people put in temperature sensors! Looking at this problem as an engineer:

1. He hasn't changed anything about his hardware
2. Heat sinks are held in place very firmly. They don't unseat themselves easily.
3. The CPU fan still runs fine
4. The CPU isn't showing any over-temp symptoms

ergo, the sensor is likely malfunctioning, or perhaps he has loaded new software/firmware that reads the temperature sensor differently (happens all the time).

Don't jump to waste your money on a new cooling solution without some further evidence.

You can always pull off the heatsink, apply new thermal paste, and re-seat it. That's a tricky operation that's unnecessary if it was done properly in the first place, and is more likely to cause problems if there was nothing wrong.
A hotter CPU will heat up a room faster, and generally isn't great for the hardware. Over time dust will build up and will trap heat inside a device. The only way to clean the dust out of a heatsink is to remove it, clean it, and re seat it.
Re seating a CPU is not a hard task at all. It takes 5 minutes and can make a big difference.