i7 920 at 52 degrees celsius

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MrSloppy

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 20, 2006
Messages
130
Hello,

I have a i7 920 with a Thermal Right Ultra-120 Extreme-1366 on it inside a HAF 932 case.
The CPU isn't overclocked yet, but I had bought the fan in preparation for the day when I'll need to.

However right now the CPU is sitting at 52 degrees celsius. I've built this system for a few years now but I've only started paying attention to the heat again because I've been thinking of overclocking.

Is this kind of stock temperature supposed to be normal?
 
Load it and see what temperatures it reaches. If it gets above 70C or so at stock speed, I'd say the heatsink needs to be reseated (unless your room temperature is high).
 
What was the program that people used to test load their CPU to see if their overclock is stable again? :O
 
If you're idling in the 50s I wouldn't be running any benchmarks just yet. There must be a problem with the HSF, it may just need to be reseated, or maybe the paste wasn't applied properly. Check it out.
 
Pnanasnoic said:
If you're idling in the 50s I wouldn't be running any benchmarks just yet. There must be a problem with the HSF, it may just need to be reseated, or maybe the paste wasn't applied properly. Check it out.
Click to expand...
High temperatures will not damage the CPU, and running a stress-testing program will help identify if the problem is with the heatsink or the way it's installed, or if the temperature sensors are just reading high at idle.
 
Well the IntelBurnTest says my system is stable. And it looks like my high temperature was a result of yesterday being really hot and I don't have AC on, only open window.

My cores sits around 46 degrees celsius right now. It still seems a bit high though, judging by other people's comments. I'm assuming I need to find some way to drop the temperatures even more before I even think about overclocking, right?

I'll start buying stuff I need to clean off my old paste and reapply.

Is 100% alcohol alright? Also what should I use to clean off the old paste?

Thank you guys so much for the help as well, I really appreciate this.
 
What was the highest temperature you saw while running IntelBurnTest? Also, what program are you using to check the temperature?
 
You really need to state your room temp. Cause a delta T of say 40C is great at 20C, but bad at 30C...
 
is that one of your core temps or your tcase temp because core temps are not very accurat at idle and can be off quiet a bit so you won't know if they are really running hot till you load them.

but if thats tcase then that is pretty hot for idle.
 
I use HWMonitor and PC Probe 2.

Right now my house is 28 degrees OC, no AC on, windows are open and it's 31 degrees OC outside.


At the moment PC Probe 2 is saying that my CPU is at 45 OC, HWMonitor is showing temperature for all of my cores and it's fluxating between 50-52 degrees OC.
 
Your ambients are a little higher than most people's and higher than most heatsink reviews.

You could probably improve things with a better mount, but I wouldn't say your temperatures are completely unreasonable.

Use prime or linpack, and load up your cores. If there's a huge disparity between each of your cores' temperatures, you have an uneven mount and can compensate by either tightening or loosing some of the mounting screws. If all cores are high, just remount the heatsink and reapply thermal paste.


Idle temps are kind of meaningless. Due to different software configurations, your idle is not the same as my idle etc. Also the thermal probes in processors aren't very accurate when measuring lower temperatures.
 
Hello,

I've finally gotten my new motherboard back and reinstalled my HSF along with everything else this afternoon. It's 25C right now in my area.

However I'm getting a large difference in temperatures. I've uploaded a screenshot of three different programs I'm using to get the temperatures: Asus Probe 2, HWMonitor, and RealTemp 3.60.

Is this normal?

 
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Still there is something wrong. Your seating must be off, since 44-47c idle on a 920 is not good at all. So, I have two suggestions for you:

- Reseat the heatsink - only use a tiny bb sized drop in the middle of the CPU.
- Your voltage of 1.28 is way too high for stock speeds - you could easily get by with much less voltage than that.
 
I'll go with your suggestion right away. I've been using the line method that I saw people mention a while ago.

Also I've let the BIOS do the auto settings for my CPU, the only thing that changes my computer settings at the moment is the ASUS EPU-6, and I -think- that only affects my Chipset and Memory at the moment. What sort of volt range should I be dropping it down to?

Thank you very much for helping, by the way, I really appreciate this.
 
if he is using air cooling, not liquid, that isnt so horrid. Im sitting at 38C on my i7 920 with a Corsair H70 attached.

He really isnt sitting as high as he thinks. What voltage are you running the board at? Some boards out of the box run the cpu's a little higher than normal.
 
I'll be honest here, I'm a total newbie at this.

I just plugged the CPU, attached an aftermarket heatsink and started the whole thing up. I didn't even go into the BIOS to make any changes to anything except the boot order of my HDDs.

My motherboard is a P6T. The only thing the might even remotely resemble overclocking that I'm doing is the EPU-6 program that came with my ASUS mobo but I think that only messes around with my chipset and memory settings.

Currently I'm air cooled using a TRUE heatsink and the fan that came with it.

What kind of voltage should I be aiming for? I intend to begin overclocking my i7 920 once I've gotten a good temperature at stock.

--EDIT

By the way, I'm reading over the Arctic Silver 5's instructions right now. Do I really have to wait 200 hours for the break-in period to see if I had done things somewhat right or is there a trick to speed up the process? I had just reapplied AR5 on my CPU this afternoon.
 
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The break in is a heat/cool cycle to properly set it. It will get cooler, but not a huge amount...

I'm overclocked at 3.4 aqnd only 1.22V so, youre huge over... i'd try like 1.15V and run a LinX or ibt.
 
MrSloppy said:
By the way, I'm reading over the Arctic Silver 5's instructions right now. Do I really have to wait 200 hours for the break-in period to see if I had done things somewhat right or is there a trick to speed up the process? I had just reapplied AR5 on my CPU this afternoon.
Click to expand...

lol 200 hours? link me to where it says that please.
 
Patonb said:
The break in is a heat/cool cycle to properly set it. It will get cooler, but not a huge amount...

I'm overclocked at 3.4 aqnd only 1.22V so, youre huge over... i'd try like 1.15V and run a LinX or ibt.
Click to expand...

Ok, I'm going to uninstall the EPU-6 and TurboV program. These things are making automatic settings for me and from the sounds of it, they're doing a horrible job at it.

As for the 200 hours, it's what I gleamed from over there. If you think that's ridiculous, that's fine. I'm perfectly open to other words of wisdom, I'm the learner here that's why I'm here asking for help as humbly as I can.

http://www.arcticsilver.com/pdf/appmeth/int/vl/intel_app_method_vertical_line_v1.1.pdf
 
MrSloppy said:
What was the program that people used to test load their CPU to see if their overclock is stable again? :O
Click to expand...

OCCT works fine for me... And it will "test" more than just your CPU.

One thing to note is whether, or not, Hyperthreading is turned on? It will normally raise your CPU temps by about 10°C. The other thing is whether, or not, your heat sink is properly oriented? If its a "Heat Pipe" type unit then the "pipes" should be perpendicular to the orientation of the cores, to get the best heat transfer. When I got my first Ci7 920, I used a Prolimatech Megahelems, which needed to be mounted so the fans were on the top and bottom (pushing hot air out the top of the case). And let me tell you it was a massive pain to get those fans hooked on with the little wires...

Personally I have to recommend that you ditch the whole air cooling plan and just get one of the self contained water-cooling systems from Corsair, or Antec. Obviously the Corsair H100 would be the ideal for overclocking. But the others can be made to work.

Oh... btw I just moved my one system from my HAF 932 to the Storm Sniper so I could have time to repaint my 932, or you'd see that in my sig. :cool:
 
MrSloppy said:
As for the 200 hours, it's what I gleamed from over there. If you think that's ridiculous, that's fine. I'm perfectly open to other words of wisdom, I'm the learner here that's why I'm here asking for help as humbly as I can.
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IMO, it's an outdated thermal paste and I don't understand why people still use it since it has excessive cure time. I prefer any of the Arcting Cooling MX-2, MX-3, or MX-4 compound. Virtually, no cure time and performs equal to or better than AS5.

I ordered 30 grams of MX-2 earlier today from Sidewinder Computers:

http://www.sidewindercomputers.com/arcomxthco30.html

30 grams, btw, will last most people several years.
 
Maybe I should pick up a 4 gm one of the MX-4. People seem to be raving about that.

Should I get my TRUE-120 lapped and use the penny mod as well? I'm still sitting around 38-40C. I don't think my TRUE-120 is having a serious dent on the heat dissipation.
 
Lapping it wouldn't hurt, although I never performed it on mine. The penny mod? I've heard of it but never tried it.

If your temps are good I wouldn't worry about doing all these things, unless you have to do it just cuz you want to.
 
Thing is I don't even know if this temperature is good due to the fact that I'm not using a stock HSF.
 
Here's my data: 920 3.6GHz 1.28v + TRUE, 39-42C idle, 81-89C max load. All my system fans are pretty darn slow and quiet. It ran Prime95 for 18 months without issue. 30 months on, everything is still working fine.

So, 52C idle stock clock seems kinda high, but the real question is what happens under load. Try gradual loading, 1 core, 2, 3, then all 4 cores. Stop if it's obvious temp is out of control on just 1 or 2 cores.

I see that RealTemp 3.69.1 beta is out.
 
Well, before moving to water, I did 39-41 idle and 70-72 load, and that was with 4 GHz at 1.2975 vcore.

Now, I hardly hit 60c.
 
hdnut said:
What is your max load temp?

Have you run prime95 or intel burn test?
Click to expand...

I see that my max load temperature is 49C after running IntelBurnTest, but it's also a cool 20C outside right now at the moment as well.

xorbe said:
Here's my data: 920 3.6GHz 1.28v + TRUE, 39-42C idle, 81-89C max load. All my system fans are pretty darn slow and quiet. It ran Prime95 for 18 months without issue. 30 months on, everything is still working fine.

So, 52C idle stock clock seems kinda high, but the real question is what happens under load. Try gradual loading, 1 core, 2, 3, then all 4 cores. Stop if it's obvious temp is out of control on just 1 or 2 cores.

I see that RealTemp 3.69.1 beta is out.
Click to expand...

Idef1x said:
Well, before moving to water, I did 39-41 idle and 70-72 load, and that was with 4 GHz at 1.2975 vcore.

Now, I hardly hit 60c.
Click to expand...

See this is what I don't get. We're both using the TRUE-120. I've set my vCore to 1.01v, the 920 is 2.8 ghz, and yet we're sitting at identical temperatures. Idef1x is sitting at an even lower temperature and at 2/3 higher clock speed of mine.

I just don't get what I'm doing wrong with my TRUE-120 to get such a poor heat dissipation performance. :(
 
I had pretty high temps on my 950. 3 coolers later and multiple reseatings, i am idling at ~45c, load 69c. Before the noctua, loads would hit in the high 70s, low 80s. on the stock heatsink, i was hitting over 90c benching. So im at 4ghz, 1.28volts, 191x21. these things can definitely run warm but can also take the heat. get more airflow, clean up cables, lower vcore and triple check the seating and very small amount of as5.
 
Yes. I've done it again just now, ambient room temperature is 27C and IntelBurnTest load temp maxes out at 52C

Is it safe to use the penny mod without lapping my TRUE-120? This will be my fourth time reseating this thing and I'll be using the pea sized AR5 in the center of the CPU this time around instead of the line method.
 
I see, I guess I'll start dabbling with overclocking then. Thanks again everyone!
 
Does no one use CoreTemp? I thought that was the hot program to use back in the day for temps..Its all ive ever really used.
 
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