Motherboard temp question

I bought a Dell XPS 630 last April, and it's been working fine so far. I'm not a hardware guy at all, so I didn't pay too much attention to the diagnostic software that came with it, but today I opened the nvidia system monitor tool because I was curious about what information it reported. I soon noticed that it's reporting the motherboard temperature as 178 degrees Celsius (352 F).



I shut the computer off while I took a shower and made coffee, and then I opened the box up to peek inside. Everything looks normal - it's a little dusty but that's to be expected I think. The computer runs in a basement office where the room temp is about 68 F. The air leaving the back of the tower is slightly warm but not hot or anything. The motherboard is right next to one of the metal sides of the tower and the box is slightly warm, but it's a barely noticeable temperature difference.

I figure this has got to be a sensor or software problem. I haven't noticed anything unusual in the computer's functioning, and the software reports the number 178 C as a constant that didn't change at all after being shut down for half an hour or so. The other numbers all fluctuate a bit with operation, but the System Temp never changes. Then I went into the nvidia control panel and looked at the motherboard settings and all the "cooling" entries are blank? Is this supposed to be that way?



edit:

I just realized after going into the "edit profiles" tab that the system cooling is set to 0:

178 C is very very hot for a motherboard. Have you tried other softwares too to check the temperatures as some are better to check cpu temperatures than others and same for motherboard and all others.

I don't think that cooling tabs are empty is a good sign, try to set them a at some value, 50% or so to start.

To check if the sensors on the motherboard are broken open your case and check if all the fans are spinning and put on a external fan on it and check if the temperature is changing.

I think the sensors are broken cause 178 C is just way too hot, 40 is about normal.

It turns out to be a common problem with the xps 630 and ndvidia monitor tool. Apparently 178C is the highest reading, and it's defaulting to that for some reason for which there doesn't seem to be a fix yet.