Laptop gets hot when lid closed (new, not fans)

So I have a strange thing going on with my new asus. its a k53sv (intel 2360qm, 6gb ram, nvidida 540m, 5400rpm HD)
(i might open this for discussion well see)
My laptop has an aluminum finish where your writsts rest and generally stays cool and doesnt warm up relative to the core/chipset.

Its a little under 1 month old, I got it new (at least the e-retailer said it was new and i couldnt see a damn thing to suggest other wise when i unboxed it).

I generally put my laptop on sleep when not using it for more than a couple hours at a time. I use HW monitor to monitor my temps. Generally my cores & chipset are in the 44C-50C range when not being used, when im just using firefox etc. When I game they generally went up to 66C-68C-ish.
Anyways......
I left my laptop on, not doing anything for about 5-6 hours today, I closed the lid. When I got home, the palm rest area was very very warm, more so than it should be I believe, as I left it idle throughout the night this trend continued.
However....when I started running cpu intensive programs, the palm area started cooling! Even as the HWmonitor temps rose.

Note: my chipset temp seems to be hovering in the 52c-54c range... is that okay?

My fans seem to be working perfectly fine, so I dont know why this would be happening.

any insight is appreciated! thanks!
-cs