Overheating

[Kilz]

I really liked lmde, and ran it for about 6 months. But lately I have ran into a serious heat issue. I have now had to abandon lmde in favor of mint 11. I still have lmde installed on a separate partition. for the most part it is a stock install on good hardware.

The hardware
Ultra black case
2 120mm case fans (one bloing in, the other out)
AMD 9950 black running at normal speed (I dont overclock)
TR2-R1 cpu cooling fan
Asus M3a78 motherboard with up to date bios

This computer is 2 years old and has not had heat issues. Its cleaned out every 6 months. But lately LMDE makes the heat build up to the point that I get alarms and have to shut it down when the temp gets to 45c. With only 1 or 2 things open. Alternately I am running Mint 11 on the other partition with the same normal software (gnome, chrome, thunderbird, vlc, a few games)and the heat only hits 37-38c under the same load.
Any ideas on where to look as to why lmde is overheating?

[TBABill]

45c is not overheating. That's a normal temp and on the lower end of normal. Most machines don't overheat until they reach 85c+. My Dell computers shut down at 100c and my HP at 99c. I always run 43-45c at idle and warmer under load. With videos (flash) it gets to 55-60c. If your machine is shutting down and alarming at such a low temp, either you have a bios or sensor issue. No machine should be considered hot at that temp that I'm aware of, but it could be something I've just never experienced before so....

[Kilz]

Well thats good that it isnt going to harm my hardware. But I do get a high continuous beep till the screen freezes if I let it go over 45c. But only happens on lmde, not mint 11, kind of strange. I googled the beeps and thats the signal for a high temp. That's when I updated the bios just to eliminate that. I wish I could figure out what is going on because one thing I do not like is yearly upgrades, thats why I was using a rolling release.
I did a test, I had to get 3 pages with flash video going to make Mint 11 go up to 47c, and no beeps or freezes. Kind of strange.

[xircon]

You could repaste your CPU, made a big difference on my laptop. Other than that, perhaps the cpufreq driver for your processor did not install/load.

[gn2]

Hesitant to suggest this given your expertise, but could it be caused by different flashplayer versions/configurations between your LMDE installation and Mint 11 installation?
Could it be that you have more background processes running in LMDE?

[Kilz]

Thanks for the answer gn2,
I do have a lot of experience with debian/ubuntu and tend to do the obvious checking like the forums and google for answers. But sometimes its an area I have not delt with and cant find answers easily. I had already done the bios update, cleaned out the computer, and re pasted the cpu before my first post. But those that suggested those things at least followed my favorite principle kiss (keep it simple stupid). Most of the time this will solve the issue, but in this case it didnt.
I started up lmde and opened top in a terminal. I noticed one thing right off. There are 4 zombie process running, and only 1 on mint 11. Xorg is constantly running and using a lot of cpu. This may be the problem.
But now that I am using Mint 11 I am starting to like the polish it has over lmde. A benefit of it is the stability I prefer. Not that I couldnt fix the 10 odd bugs that have happened since I started running it up to now. But it gets old after awhile. Add to it the fact that I realize now that lmde is headed for the train wreck that is gnome 3 means I will just let lmde be and stay with mint 11 for now. It will give me a little more time to decide what I am going to use as a desktop next as I have been a gnome users for a long time.

Thanks for everyone that offered help. But I think this one is a battle in futility right now.

[gn2]

Know what you mean about choosing a DE for future use, I think come April next year it'll be Xfce for me.