High i7 temps for stock clocks?

[Fr33m4n]

I recently went ahead and purchased an i7 920 and a Gigabyte EX58-Extreme mobo. I've pretty much just put it together and have not had much time to play with it yet but what I have done is run some Prime95 to check CPU temps.

At everything stock, no OC and stock fan, my cpu idles at about 40C with an ambient temp of 21C. Running Prime95 for 20 minutes makes the temp raise to 75C. Temps are measured with HWMon.

According to what I've read some places people are able to OC with the stock cooler to about 3.4GHz and not reach much higher temps.

Is this normal or have I made a mistake somewhere? I cleaned of the thermal paste that came with the stock cooler and applied AS5 instead. BB sized droplet and a firm squeeze. I haven't tried reseating the heatsink yet.

 

[i7guy1]

That's about right. There is a lot of variability that people report with this chip in terms of temperature. I RMAd my first chip because stock temps went to 100C when running Prime95.

 

[Shmee]

hmm, well, my i7 920 at 3.21 Ghz goes to about 60 C on Linpack. Idk, mb im lucky, but mb those temps are a bit high. Idle for me is around 31 C.

 

[exar333]

I was able to lower my voltage considerably and still run up to 3.2 and keep the temps in the low 60's. The stock cooler really held me back (and most other others as well). Anything above 3.2ghz was too much for the stock cooler to handle.

I was able to lower the voltage to <1.10v and with it running at stock, it was only went up to ~50C under full load; ~30C idle.

 

[aigomorla]

still too much paste?

how big was the bb?

it should be a stright line down the middle of your ihs, going the long side down.

if your still lost, draw an X in the middle of your IHS but make the X thin.

 

[iCyborg]

With TRUE and everything at stock speed/voltage etc, my 920 was running ~65C with prime95 (my ambient is quite high too). At 3.6 and a bit more voltage, it's running only about 5-6C more. I think that the stock settings are a bit over-conservative and push more voltage than really needed for stock. At least in my case.

 

[Fr33m4n]

Originally posted by: aigomorla
still too much paste?

how big was the bb?

it should be a stright line down the middle of your ihs, going the long side down.

if your still lost, draw an X in the middle of your IHS but make the X thin.

Check this article out:
http://benchmarkreviews.com/in...1&limit=1&limitstart=3

The stock IHS has a circular bottom. Using a circular BB droplet will make the paste spread evenly in a circular fashion. But you're right, I might have used a little much. A line will result in an oval shaped spread that won't quite match the IHS and using an X will make the paste spread like a square which will definitely not match the stock IHS. I'll try and reseat the stock IHS when I have some free time on my hands. Have to work through the weekend though, so I won't have the time just yet.

I'll try and drop my voltage somewhat in order to see what that will do for my temps. I'd really rather not break 70C with this CPU. I'll definitely have to get a new IHS when there are a few good i7 ones out on the market. I probably won't OC much until then. Don't feel like spending money on something that just uses an adapter. I'd rather have something that is actually made for the i7.