Okay, so if I stick a fan against my hand for 30 minutes, won't the surface of my hand be colder than the room?
But thats because evaporating water/sweat is transferring heat from your hand. Unfortunately, your heatsink/fan doesnt have this.
No, you're both wrong, no amount of air will make your hand colder than the room you're standing in: think about it, if the temperature in the room is 20c then the air blowing onto your hand is also 20c - how can 20c air make your hand colder than 20c? It's impossible! Your hand will feel freezing cold, but that's because your body's natural temperature is 36c and if you're blowing a lot of 20c air onto it it'll eventually start dropping below that, and if you get even 2-3 degrees below 36c it'll feel pretty cold. There is no way you can get it colder than the air around it!
It's basic physics: within a closed system (and let's assume that your room is a cold system) heat will move from the hotter object to the colder one until the two objects are at the same temperature. In this case your hand is the hotter object, the air around it is the colder object. If the air around your hand is at 20c, heat will constantly emanate from your hand to the air. Your hand will never drop to 20c because your body's biological processes are constantly generating more heat - unless you were a corpse of course, in which case your body heat would gradually dissipate until you were the same temperature as the room around you. Sweat helps to cool you down because its evaporation removes heat from your body more quickly and efficiently than radiation alone, but it's still impossible for it to drop you below ambient temperature!
Same with your computer. Your heatsink is basically a heat-exchanger: it transfers heat from your chip to the air in your room. The fans simply speed up this transfer. There's no way they can make the chip or the heatsink colder than your room. You'd need phase cooling, liquid nitrogen, or some other sort of refridgeration to do that.
As one poster said, the CPU cooler was brand new. The cooper plating would have been ice cold, and probably brought the reading down a bit.
It will only have been colder than ambient if you had it in the fridge, or outside. Even so, the time you spent handling it and putting it together would have brought it up to your room's ambient temp.
This is not about your reported temps, btw. If the temperature in your room really was around 8-10c like the weather forecast claimed then it's perfectly possible that the 16c reading in your BIOS was correct. I doubt it, because even with no central heating your house would be warmer than outside (due to heat emanating from your fireplace, your cooking stove, your fridge and other appliances, the bodies of the people living inside etc), but it's possible. I'm just pointing out that you're still under the misapprehension that it's possible for your PC to be colder than the room it's in simply by moving the air inside it about with a few fans.
