Legit Reviews

I have installed a Core 2 Duo E6300 proccessor on the MSI P965 Neo-F motherboard using the Intel's heatsink included in the proccessor's box. The system was running fine for about five months, however the recently installed MSI's utility "core center" notifies me with an alarm that the CPU's fan speed is below normal. It actually falls to about 850rpms when running applications such as games(I didn't however run the games for more than half an hour because I was a little afraid). I checked it also at the BIOS hardware monitor, and with the utility PCwizard 2006 and I took the same rpm values. The CPU's temperature while running applications such as games goes up to 47 Celsius sometimes and while the computer remains idle in Windows it is usually around 35 Celsius. In this second case I receive no alarms and the fan's speed remains at it's default values (1600-1700rpms). The motherboard's temperature never exceeds 35 Celsius. The temperatures seems normal, however I'm worried that the fan is malfunctioning. I wasn't using the motherboard's smart fan function when the "problem" occured. Shall I replace the heatsink or is this normal?What are the normal operating speeds of theese fans?

check in the BIOS to see if you can set the fan speed at certain temps... maybe something got set wrong in the BIOS if this just started... Did you by chance change BIOS settings or update the BIOS?

No...No BIOS updates or messing with the settings. My m/b is low budget and
doesn't even have many fan settings. There is an option called "Smart fan function" and I can only enable or disable it. If I enable it I can set a temperature and if it is exceeded by 2 degrees(I can add values from 1 to 5 degrees) the fan is supposed to speed up. If it goes below 35(the temperature I setted) by two degrees the fan is supposed to slow down. But the problem occured while this option was disabled. It was like that by default so I thought this meant that the fan will always work at full speed. Can the motherboard be faulty?

Could you try plugging the CPU fan into a different fan header on the motherboard? If you want it to run at 100% then try to find a different header or use a 3-pin to 4-pin adapter and plug it into a 4-pin molex connector.