60 C is fine for Intel chips. AMD's would be almost at their max.

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

I enabled CPU Thermal Control and Speedstep in BIOS. So temps will not rise above 60c no matter how hard I push her. CPU may be reading at 100% but the voltage throttles down. That is my understanding of how those features work. Been letting computer run flat out since yesterday with no problems. No Blue screen since I disabled the screen saver.
Am wondering if 60c is a safe temp to run at constant. Not seeing an performance issues on computer. Can still watch streaming vids, encode, play games, render with BIONC running in background. Even with TThrottle off temps stay at 60c. Highest I have seen since enabling Thermal Control is 62c, but only for short moments.
Is there a way to change the thermal control settings? Only see enable and auto. Would feel better if it was running at 50c constant rather than 60c.

I installed 2 more fans in my case to assist with cooling. It's really windy...actuallyly more of a breeze coming out of the computer case then the box fan sitting in my window. It's not an air flow problem. :( As Valdis said, I need a better CPU heat sink or liquid cooled. Don't have the money to spend on such things at the moment. I just remounted the motherboard/CPU heat sinks last April with Artic Silver 5. Wasn't running hot... just basic maintenance and peace of mind.
This is my current CPU heat sink. http://www.coolermaster.com/product.php?product_id=6602 Also installed better than stock heat sinks on north and south bridge chips. P5NE-SLI motherboard

Not using a standard computer case either. Far too little room to work. Built a case out of scrap 3/4" plywood... redneck I know but I love it. 23"x24"x10"

You want to avoid CPU usage going u & down as this amounts to heat cycling - possibly the most punishing thing you can do to electronics. Machines are best working flat-out 24/7 anyway for heat consistency.

...Do wonder about acuracy of temps. There is a 10c difference between the readings I get with ASUS/Speedfan and TThrottle...

If you are using an AMD processor this is a known issue. Take a look through the TThrottle forum.
http://www.efmer.eu/forum_tt/index.php?topic=627.0
http://www.efmer.eu/forum_tt/index.php?topic=469.0

...Really wondering about uploading...

Servers are having issues ATM, but it seems like they are working on it as we type.

Send me a $100 or a liquid cooler and I'll install it. ;) Have a somewhat better CPU cooler than a stock unit.

Only have 5 (120mm) of the 10 fans I have room for installed in my case. They pull fresh air into the case and push over HDD's, motherboard, vid card and out the back vents. Been putting it off... Normally temps have not been an issue even with gaming and CADD rendering. Heck, I can't even get computer to reach 65c+ with stress testing. Part of the reason I never bothered installing the extra fans.

Yes I cleaned heat sinks. Do so every two weeks like clockwork when ex wife takes son for visitation. Clean fish tank on same schedule. :)

Would really be cool if you could earn hardware with the credits. Yes, I understand this is volunteer work. What are the credits for anyway?

Installed TThrottle pdelgado, thank you. It helps with temps and really reduces CPU spiking seen with BIONC. Do wonder about acuracy of temps. There is a 10c difference between the readings I get with ASUS/Speedfan and TThrottle. TThrottle reads 10c higher. However all three programs read the GPU temperatures as the same. :s
Running around 60% CPU average at 50c (speedfan/ASUS).

Really wondering about uploading. Server still looks like it's down. There are 44 projects and counting that have not been uploaded. What happens when the deadline is reached? Will the project be passed on to another user? Seems like a waste of computing time and electricity if that is the case. :(

Have you taken a look at TThrottle?
http://www.efmer.eu/boinc/

As yourself, I too am a newbie. But I am a hardware nut, as far as your cooling goes, you probably have a standard CPU cooler on your processor, may I suggest that you replace that with a good water cooler(yes, they are very safe). I have been useing one for about a year and have had no problems. No matter how hot the air temp gets the CPU doesn't get any where past 50 degrees C. I personally use a Corsair cooling system and in Canada they cost only about $100. They are very easy to install, I run at 100%, 24/7 and have had no problems at all.

One SETI@Home process is launched per logical CPU. So if you have a quad-core system, you'll have four threads running. The apps are not multi-threaded, so running a single process would only keep one logical CPU busy while all others remain unused. Progress is being made into finding out how much of a performance gain is earned from a multi-threaded app, but last I heard, there was much overhead involved in cache-coherency, slowing down the overall progress.

Even if you were to have a multi-threaded app using all cores, because you are using your system at 100% with distributed computing, the temperature issue would still exist.

If you wish to reduce your temps, I would suggest going into your Computing Preferences and either limiting the number of cores BOINC uses and/or reducing the use of each core from 100% down to whatever number you're comfortable with.

Note that the CPU throttling feature works kinda weird here. If you set it at 50%, your CPU will work at 100% for one second, then at 0% for the next second. If you set it at 25%, your CPU will work at 100% for one second, then 0% for the next three seconds, so you will see "spikes" in CPU usage, but it ultimately works out to be the same.

[Edit] Your completed tasks are trying to upload, but the SETI servers are having issues at the moment, so they'll keep trying to upload automatically on their own. The average size MultiBeam result uploaded is around 8-15 kilobytes if I remember correctly. I don't know how large the average AstroPulse result is, but I think its around the same size.

I'm just wondering if one of you could help me out here. I just started and I'm a bit unsure as to how to set things up. I have been running BOINC for a couple of days now and it is kinda cool. My only problem is that weather here has been 90f and I don't have AC. It has been so hot the last few days that I'm afraid to let everything run at 100%. This morning I woke up to a BSOD :( Have not had one of those in over a year. When checked my temps my CPU was running at 65c+. Normally I never see temps any higher than 52c.
My CPU is not over clocked, want it to last as long as possible. Don't want to stress my five year old CPU too much... hoping it will last another five years.
Can anyone post a screen shot of settings so system is not running over 70% CPU/GPU?

I don't understand why 3-4 tasks will be running simultaneously instead of devoting resources to just task at a time. Or one task for CPU and one for GPU. Wouldn't the calculations be faster?

Right now 11 tasks are "done" but in the status bar it says "Uploading" are these projects done and need to be uploaded or are they still waiting to upload data to Seti@home servers? What is the average size of the files being uploaded?