Extruder Heater overshoots by >60C

So, a bit of back story. At my school, we have a design center where students can work on their teams and have access to tools and supplies, etc. Last semester, one guy started building a large (~70cm^3 print space, ~100cm^3 total size) 3d printer, based on a reprap concepts, for the whole design center to use. However, this semester, he's gone on co-op, with the printer built but non functional. My team leader tossed the project to me, since I finished building my Prusa i3 this summer and was using it to print parts for our project. I got the wiring finished up and the motors move and home just fine, but one odd issue persists. When I turn the extruder heater on, it overshoots the correct temperature by 60-70 degrees. That is, I set it to go to 190C, and it went clear up to 260C before cooling back down to temp and maintaining it. Once it's there, it's fine, but that temperature spike could burn filament and clog the nozzles. The printer uses a Kraken 4 head extruder, which requires a water cooling system, but that's all set up as well. Any advice or suggestions would be much appreciated.

Dexterousfolder,
It sounds like you need to do a PID auto tuning. Then it won't overshoot like that.
This feature is built into Repetier and Marlin, perhaps other firmware.
After doing this feature, the results are reported, and you update the firmware with the new values.

See This

Regards,
Paul

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/29/2014 08:34PM by Paul Wanamaker.

Sorry for the delay, I can only get over to the design center to work in between classes. Anyway, I tried the autotuning, but it always aborts, with the message "PID Autotune failed! Temperature too high." I tried changing the settings by hand, but that had little effect. I also tried checking the actual temperature of the extruder with a laser thermometer, but since I can only read the outside of the block, it was reading obviously incorrect temperatures. (as in, reading ~20C when the thermistor said 200C, and being hot enough to melt filament). Are there any other settings I can modify to correct this? for instance, would modifying the value for #define PID_MAX affect anything else?