One of my older computers started shutting down suddenly and when I tried running it again, it would give me the beep code for overheating. However, I tried to get some info using Speccy, but couldn't even run the computer long enough to open the app. I left the computer off for several hours, tried turning it on and got the beep code again immediately (although it had been off for hours). I finally managed to at least get into the BIOS where it told me the computer was running at 86 degrees Celsius, but that did not change what-so-ever even though I watched it for a while. This doesn't make sense to me, previously when I've had trouble with overheating, I generally have at least a couple of minutes to work with before my computer shuts down, however even after leaving it off for hours I wasn't even able to turn it on. Secondly, the temperature was locked at 86 degrees when I finally managed to turn it on, I've had issues with overheating before and the temperature is usually continually climbing as well as generally being above 100 degrees. Could my sensor be broken?
The Motherboard and CPU are both Intel, I've got 2GBs of RAM in the PC, an NVidia FX 1700 GPU and some 80GB HDD. Neither the CPU fan or the system fan is dusty, so that shouldn't be a problem. I do not have any kind of thermal compound and replacing that will be the first thing I try, but the conditions just looked strange so I wanted to see if there might be something wrong with the sensor first.