To mrfatboy,
To start out with, if your e8400 is anything like my e5200, it will smoothly downclock at times of light load. And regardless if you run stock speeds or a big overclock to create the snappy feeling under load, either way it will underclock to a a lower multiplier under conditions of light load likely to be the norm for your daddy.
But still you should rightly worry about heat with any overclock. But you should realize that increased cpu temperatures is a really a function of time and temperature. And thus an artificial benchmark like primes95 is artificial, because it ignores the time factor. Because as long as primes95 runs, cpu load is
near 100% on all cores for as long as you choose to run primes95. And if you have a temperature monitoring utility open at the same time, its may take a full 10 minutes or so of gradually rising temperatures to reach a point where cpu temperatures stabilize. Which is your worse case scenario.
But in daddio's real world situation, he may suddenly decide to load a big program, which might take a minute max, and once loaded, his cpu down clocks to a lower multiple and gets no where near as hot.
So you probably need to look at both scenarios to decide where you need to worry in deciding on if you need better cooling or not.
So I would suggest your daddy keep somethings like real temps open during normal use, if it ever exceeds 72.4 during normal use, you are running too big of a clocking for stock cooling.
"Note: the cpu can go up to 72.4C (you can add 5 more degrees to it)" is one link I found.
. Should I use the stock fan as is or wipe of what they provide and put on AS5?
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