i7-4790 at 90 degrees..toasty

[GeezerMan]

Friend of mine picked up a Dell business class SFF, small form factor, PC this past week with a i7-4790. It's like an ITX size PC. It's hitting 90 C under load, like video transcoding. Idle temps are fine.

Dell says, as long as it is not shutting down, It's OK.. I say that kind of heat will shorten the lifespan , and all Dell cares about is getting the PC through the warranty period.

what say you?

 

[Phynaz]

It's within specs, it's fine.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Intel guarantees 100C and it will throttle from there.

Whatever lifeshortening it does, its way beyond the useful life of the chips.

Even old Thunderbirds you could fry eggs on still works flawless today.

 

[rge2]

For a 4790k at 4.4ghz with 1.2v those would be normal temps for stock cooler encoding.

For a 4790 at 3.6ghz and vcore should be 1.05 or less, those are high temps for encoding. I would have him check vcore. Either he got a really crappy cpu with high vcore required despite low stock mhz, or more likely dell did a sloppy job of applying tim on stock cooler.

Regardless of lifespan issues, I would at least try remounting cooler if vcore wasnt high.

Though running at stock, my wife has a dell laptop that is now 7 years old, doesnt use it much anymore, but temps were always 90+C, often throttling, and still chugging along fine....high temps and some laptops were just norm. I doubt high temps would cause cpu to go bad before computer became obsolete.

 

[GeezerMan]

I'll have to ask him what the volts are under load, he told me, but I can't recall, something like 1.17 or so.

This is the article that got him going, electromigration
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1800828/intel-temperature-guide.html

It's probably a situation where the lifespan is shorted. Instead of 20 years, it lasts only 10..and not many people care about performance for 10 years.

 

[BSim500]

First thing is to double check the cooler. If that's OK and if he's not overclocking, then also maybe try undervolting it a little in the BIOS.

 

[GeezerMan]

I don't think he'll be doing much volt adjustment in a Dell

 

[ShintaiDK]

You look for a problem that isnt there.

And its not an article, its a forum post he refers to.

If you worry about lifespan, then avoid overvolting. Temperature is insignificant compared.

 

[GeezerMan]

You look for a problem that isnt there.

And its not an article, its a forum post he refers to.

If you worry about lifespan, then avoid overvolting. Temperature is insignificant compared.

thanks for your abrasiveness...........

 

[Flapdrol1337]

90 degrees full load is normal with intel i7's at stock speed with the stock cooler. Nothing to worry about.

 

[GeezerMan]

90 degrees full load is normal with intel i7's at stock speed with the stock cooler. Nothing to worry about.

Yeah, that 90 degrees shocked me. Actually , he sent me an email saying it hit 92. He might have problems in the summer months, when the room temp goes up. Not much headroom until auto shutdown at 100 C

My personal i5-4690K runs at a tad below 60 C under full load, at stock settings, with a CM Vortex cooler, which is a HTPC 92mm cooler

 

[Flapdrol1337]

I don't think he'll be in trouble during the summer. The cpu will just not use the max turbo multipliers because there's no thermal headroom.

And there's no auto shutdown, if it goes to 100 it just clocks back dramatically until temps are safe again.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Yeah, that 90 degrees shocked me. Actually , he sent me an email saying it hit 92. He might have problems in the summer months, when the room temp goes up. Not much headroom until auto shutdown at 100 C

My personal i5-4690K runs at a tad below 60 C under full load, at stock settings, with a CM Vortex cooler, which is a HTPC 92mm cooler

Autoshutdown is around 130C or so. It starts to throttle at 100C. But I havent seen anyone even remotely close to ever trigger autoshutdown.

 

[CP5670]

It's probably using the AVX instructions. The Intel spec seems to call for a significant voltage bump when these are used. My 4790K normally runs at 65C or so on load, but shoots up to 100C on the latest Prime95 with small FFTs, even at stock settings. I was worried about it but this is apparently common, and it doesn't seem to throttle. This is on a Noctua NH-U12P as well. I would not want to run it on the dinky stock heatsink.

Even old Thunderbirds you could fry eggs on still works flawless today.

I have one of these that has one corner chipped off, and it still seems to work fine.

 

[GeezerMan]

Dell does a pretty good job with the heatsinks in their business class. Bigger than stock.
I had an old Dell Precision desktop with a quadcore in it. This is the heatsink they used,

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/106453664/aaaa.jpg

 

[escrow4]

5930K hits less than 50 celsius gaming @ 3.7GHz on a Noctua UH14-S. I would never run a CPU that hot. Heat kills, if the CPU is that hot consistently imagine the VRMs/caps on the mobo (cheapo OEM mobo to boot).

 

[Phynaz]

Again, it's within both Dell's and Intel specs. It's fine. Dell isn't going to let manual clock/voltage changes be made anyway.

 

[GeezerMan]

5930K hits less than 50 celsius gaming @ 3.7GHz on a Noctua UH14-S. I would never run a CPU that hot. Heat kills, if the CPU is that hot consistently imagine the VRMs/caps on the mobo (cheapo OEM mobo to boot).

that does bring up a good question. Just how durable are motherboards?
I've used gaming boards with the fancy VRM, multiple phases, solid caps, etc. I've seen pics of some boards blown up, usually by a poor VRM design used with overclocking.

I've also seen business class PCs, like dell, HP, used pretty hard, on for 24 hours a day for many years. I don't think any of these boards I've seen have a solid cap design.

I have a personal store bought Q6600 PC I purchased new in 2007. I treated it well, until it was passed on. The board was removed from the original case and not really handled very well after that. No electrostatic strap used by the next young owners, the board, while out of the case and running, got dropped on the floor by a certain family member. it's been in multiple PC builds, sometimes crammed in hot cases. I got it back recently. That thing refuses to die, in fact, I'm typing on it right now. Runs like a sewing machine. Very few solid caps on this board. I don't see any bulging caps at all. It's connected to a spare TV as a HTPC

 

[Puffnstuff]

Yep those q6600's are real troopers. I've got one in my spare pc on an asus striker II forumula motherboard running windows 10 technical preview in raid 0. As a matter of fact I've still got a q9550 just sitting around and a c2d on a gigabyte x48 board. Anyway the stock coolers are just minimal devices in the first place, just enough to get the job done running stock. When I saw the temps mine produced with my 4790k I went down to tiger direct and bought an aftermarket unit that could do the job better.

 

[GeezerMan]

Dell does use a HSF in this business class series that is better than the Intel version

 

[BonzaiDuck]

thanks for your abrasiveness...........

Don't react too much -- he's been that way for the last year or so. :biggrin:

These issues are at the forefront of current forum posts. "Whether or not to turn off AVX2 in stress-tests.. . " "What sort of cooler do I NEED?"

The OEMs have an interest in longevity, at least through the warranty and service-contract period.

The thermal issue kept me from embracing Haswell and its refresh, just as the TIM question kept me from jumping on the Ivy Bridge wagon. And actually, the "TIM problem" WAS the cause of a thermal issue.

Probably the easiest thing you could do: investigate other CPU coolers that could still fit in the Dell case. Otherwise, I'd think an OEM like that would have this base covered, and avoid proliferating a production-line of systems that fail.

 

[GeezerMan]

Dell just told him that they want to replace the motherboard, I'm a bit surprised, they usually say if it does not shutdown, don't worry about it

 

[GeezerMan]

OK, interesting update. I thought the owner had turned off the bios fan control, but he had not, so with the CPU fan on full blast ( huge noise ) , it lowers the temps to about 77. That's better, but who wants to live with a vacuum cleaner running on their desk?

 

[Rvenger]

You should see if the CPU is actually throttling under load. If so, I'd look into better cooling options IMO. If you are throttling, you are losing performance and that is not acceptable.