How best to interpret temperature readings

[minedwiz]

I have an FX-6300 running at stock clocks, cooler by a Hyper 212 EVO, as I didn't entirely trust the stock cooler in my warm California climate. Today is particularly warm, with my ambient room temperature currently around 28-30C (I also have a fan aimed at my desk - the thermometer's across the room). I decided to run a full stress test (Prime95 blend @ all 6 cores) with both speedfan and HWmonitor open to see how it handles.

Obviously, the crazy "max" temps for CPUtin and the others in hwid can't be right, or else my system would have shut down, but how do I interpret the "real time" cpu temp? Do I believe Speedfan (with its alarming flame icon), which seems to read the same temp as HWmonitor's CPUtin, or do I believe HWMonitor's core temp reading, which is far less alarming?

 

[im1knight]

Try reading temperatures from CoreTemp or Realtemp?
I normally thought for Hwmonitor the temperature under the CPU icon is the correct one, but 35C under prime 95 seems too low to be true...
If 57C is your actual CPU temperature, it's a bit high, but still ok. I know my previous AMD Phenom IIx4 965 can handle up to 62C, not sure about FX series. And you are probably not going to see that kind of temperature during normal gaming.
And yes, sometimes it can give weird readings. Before I switched to intel platform, I had a sensor that constantly read -128C, and another at +128C...I say just look at the "value" tab, and ignore the max on those crazy readingif you will.