My CPU temperature reads 57 degrees celcius (range 55-59) using MBM5. Is that within acceptable limits or is that warmer? What about yours? I have been looking for optimum temperature values for my CPU so I know how to evaluate the reading from MBM5.

Depends what other programs and services you have running in the background. The "acceptable" range of temperatures is varied by your motherboard, specs, and cse design. I'm sure this is not a good answer for you...but it does depend what else you have running and if your computer hasn't been restarted in a while.

I believe that if you look at the temperature settings, it has default values, were it will set off an alarm if reached; you can change those values as you wish.

I see, so those default values are those that are optimized for the particular motherboard. I am not making use of MBM a lot, but the times that I have it running, no alarms were set off so perhaps that means the CPU has not reached critical temperatures. I have been a little ruffled because there were times, though not often, when the PC did restart.

As well, I believe that Windows also has a treshold that will force your computer to close if it gets too hot, so I wouldn't be scared of overheating unless those values were overid.

My ambient temperature in my room where my pc is, is fairly high. My cpu is normally between 58 and 60 degrees celsius. Under full load it will get up to 63 degrees celsius.

For a long time I worked hard to bring it down. New thermal grease, new fans etc. And I did bring it down several degrees a while back. However, my temperature is very consistent and my range for full load is fairly narrow, so I accept it as it is.

You may want to give a go to CPUIdle, I haven't tried myself, but a friend of mine was giving me realtime updates, and his temperature dropped by an amazing 10 degrees!

I think I played around with CPUIdle in the past, but I am not sure I am going a level of efficiency by having my cpu having to ramp up an down as it is not used... Not really sure though.

Another new software... CPUIdle, a cooling software. I had a look around their site, seems like they have some testimonials. I am tempted to use it, but I don't think I will unless one of you has personally tried it. CPUIdle is said to turn off the CPU when idle. I am not sure what it will do to the computer and its performance.

It is up to 55 when gaming in the summer, and idle is 35 to 40 in the summer.

In the winter it even drops down to 25 in idle and 50 while gaming.

In the summer I turn on the fans in the front too.