I have this weird overheating issue I noticed when playing Witcher 2 for the first time (got me a PC capable of handling it recently and been a bit busy with my thesis lately) yesterday on my rather new (about 2 months old) PC. I have not noticed any issues ingame like framerate drops, it runs rather smoothly, nor have there been any forced computer restart as one might expect due to overheating.

However running HW monitor while playing for about 2 hours straight last night I noticed something strange. One of the three "sensors" or whatever it is on my motherboard reported max temperature of 116 celsius (!), about 250-260 fahrenheit I believe?, which of course has made me uncertain whether I dare to play the game anymore as I don't want to cause any permanent damage to my hardware.

The thing is all other sensors seem to be fine. Gfx card maxed at about 65 centigrades, all processor sensors maxed at about 58 centigrades and the other 2 sensors on the motherboard maxed at about 65 as well. When shutting the game off and going back to windows (takes about 2 seconds from being ingame to being in windows) the HW monitor displays the temperature to be about 40 centigrades or so (quickly then drops to about 28 which is the normal idle temperature for me).
I run other games just fine temperature wise, both shogun 2 and DA2 on max settings for like 3 hours straight and the max temperature on any sensor on any component displayed by HW monitor during the session is like 70 centigrades (the same sensor is usually abit higher than the others though, maybe 75 max and the others 65 max).

Cooler Master HAF 922
Corsair HX 750W PSU
Gigabyte GA 870A-UD3
AMD phenom II X6 1090T black edition
Asus GeForce GTX560 ti (direct cu cooling thingy)

So other than watercooling or something my PC should have quite good cooling. 140mm (I believe) PSU fan, 2x 200 mm(one at the top one at the front) as well as another 140 mm chassi fans.

I also tried decreasing some gfx settings (even though my hardware should be enough to handle everything on max except for ubersampling I guess), I removed bloom as well AA and of course still no ubersampling however that does not seemed to have decreased the alarming max temperatures at all.

Would appreciate any insight.

EDIT: Just played again for a couple of hours and I must say that I suspect there to be something wrong with the measurement (considering the discrepancy between the problematic sensor and all the other sensors/components). This time I actually tabbed out of the game every 10 mins or so to look at the HW monitor and it still displayed around 115 centigrades as maximum but every single time I checked, the "current" value rarely exceeded 45 centigrades which would be more in line with the temperature on the rest of the components. How does the sensor go from 40 centigrades to 115 then back to 40 again one minute later?
Could those 115 degrees be something wrong with the measurement itself, or is those 115 degrees something that only appears for a split second or so from exhaust heat and nothing to really worry about?

The "Northbridge" (yeah, I know AMD designs don't have real Northbridges) on that specific motherboard is known for running hot. But 116C is really hot. It's "don't go around touching the heatsinks to find out which one is hot" hot.

It's normal for components that are being stressed to heat up and cool down quickly. That's a sign that the cooling provided is working, but inadequate.

It's possible for the Northbridge heatsink to get knocked around in handling, since it has one of those cheap two-pin mounts. That spoils the contact between chip and heatsink. The first thing I would try is to reseat the Northbridge heatsink with good thermal compound, and be sure it doesn't get disturbed in reassembly.

An update. I found this thread when searching the net: http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=442634

In that thread they seem to say that these kinds of issues are more related to some malfunction with software or something. That does seem like it since I just played the game for 3 hours straight with HW monitor in the background and this time the exact same sensor had a max temperature of 46 centigrades during the entire session. Would be odd if it spiked at 115 yesterday and 46 today playing the same game.
Anyway, as long as I don't get any framerate issues or crashes/system restarts I guess it's fine I should treated as a malfunction in either the software or the sensor itself?

I appreciate your help though. But not being very computer savy (atleast when it comes to hardware) I wouldn't even know where to start with your solution:p

When there's a fan involved, yes, frequently an overheat is due to the software that commands the fan performing incorrectly or failing. (Example: the early firmware on the ATI 48xx cards.)

Or an overheat may be the consequence of a badly done overclock. Most overclocks are done more or less badly, and they are eventually revealed as such when some component overheats or some software runs poorly.

But userland software like games does not cause components to overheat, unless those components were somehow defective (or rendered defective) in the first place.

Oh, by software I meant something temporarily wrong with the HW monitor software for instance in their measurement. Not that TW2 was effed up and caused an "unfair" overheat on my systems.
Will run HW monitor in the background later on today (just woke up so gonna spend some time on my thesis) when I play some TW2, if the same sensor doesn't go above 45C this time either I guess that's pretty much proof it was a mistake done somewhere?

Yeah, that sounds right. A one-time reading that doesn't appear again under the same conditions is probably just a glitch. PC temperature sensors are notoriously inaccurate and badly calibrated anyway.