Non-overclocked i7-950 Overheating

[Felt]

I have a non-overclocked i7-950 (with stock cooler) on a gigabyte x58a-ud3r that starts ~45C in BIOS and creeps to lower 50's when just watching it PC monitoring in BIOS. In SL it idles in lower 50's and under light loads (iTunes, Word) it runs in the 60's according to my iStat program. I have yet to perform any stressing because I'm a little nervous with the temps already where they're at. I've reset the cooler and placed new Arctic Silver 5 about 5 times now. I'm sure the cooler is on the cpu properly because I've heard the clicks when pushing the pins in. I've cleaned the clutter in the case to ensure proper ventilation. I have not changed any settings in BIOS other than the ones that needed to be changed to install SL with an installation disk. And my ambient temperatures are ~23C, and HDD temps are 29C.

I appreciate any help explaining why temps may run this high and suggestions to correct it. Thank you in advance!

 

[waffle head]

I'm not at all an expert, but I can suggest a number of reasons for those temps:

1) When you reapply the Arctic Silver, are you making sure to remove what was there before correctly? How are you applying it? -I think you can see it being done correctly on their website.

2) Are all your case fans working? Do the temps drop if you take a side of the case off?

3) Often the auto settings in the BIOS give an unnecessarily high CPU V core voltage. Probably around 1.28 - this can be reduced quite a bit if your running on stock settings - perhaps to around 1.17/1.16 or even less. You could also try enabling Load Line Calibration, which will take your manual V core voltage as a max voltage (as opposed to a minimum voltage when LLC is disabled/set to auto). There's not a great deal of risk involved in lowering voltages, so you might as well give it a shot.

Apparently the i7 950 does run quite hot, and quite a bit hotter than the 920/930. Also load temps are what I have been told to pay attention to. Try downloading Prime95 and running a torture ('blend') test. See if the temps go over 80c at full load. You can stop the test at any point.

At stock settings my 950 idles around 45. I run Prime95 for an hour and the highest I got was 78c. This isn't brilliant, and I think I didn't apply the thermal paste very well, but from what I gather I'm not in the danger zone.

 

[waffle head]

One other thing: I'm pretty sure the stock Intel cooler has a thermal pad on it, and that you are perhaps not supposed to use thermal paste on top of that...

 

[Felt]

Thank you for your response. My fans are working and I have followed the correct procedure in putting on thermal paste. I lowered my Vcore to just above 1.15V (any lower and I lost keyboard function). That seemed to lower the temps a few degrees. I ran Prime95 for about a minute and my temps hit 80C so I stopped.

I broke down trying to figure anything else out and went to Best Buy and purchased a Corsair A70 cooler. That lessened the load temps as I have now been running prime95 for 30 mins with the temp not exceeding 60C. However, my idle temps are still 45C in SL, but only 35C in BIOS. I can't imagine there needing to be a 10 degree difference when in BIOS as compared to SL, but I guess it doesn't matter so much as long as I'm able to keep it contained under load.

 

[Hilbe]

Thank you for your response. My fans are working and I have followed the correct procedure in putting on thermal paste. I lowered my Vcore to just above 1.15V (any lower and I lost keyboard function). That seemed to lower the temps a few degrees. I ran Prime95 for about a minute and my temps hit 80C so I stopped.

I broke down trying to figure anything else out and went to Best Buy and purchased a Corsair A70 cooler. That lessened the load temps as I have now been running prime95 for 30 mins with the temp not exceeding 60C. However, my idle temps are still 45C in SL, but only 35C in BIOS. I can't imagine there needing to be a 10 degree difference when in BIOS as compared to SL, but I guess it doesn't matter so much as long as I'm able to keep it contained under load.

I have the same setup, only with the H50 cooler. Install the new FakeSMC and TemperatureMonitor. It'll have the CPU diode temperatures readable.

I idle around 38 to 43C and 60C or so with 100% load. The i7-950 is just a HOT cpu from what I've seen.

 

[Stephen_Harris]

My cpu temp was always a little high. Then I had a spontaneous reboot so I checked my temps again and they were much higher. When I separated the stock cooler and cpu I found that I had done a bad job with the thermal paste. The recommended way is to apply a largish grain of rice to the cooler and let it squish out; not to spread it around evenly, I thought, as with a toothpick or credit card. Then I did install the V8 cooler master which is huge (I have a large full tower case though so it fits). Now all my cores run at 30-> 34 C idle and get up to about 50 C if I do some sort of hard drive scan. Haven't tested with prime. I have up to 1600 rated ram, but XMP made the voltage differential 1.65 and 1.15 which is right at the max of .50 difference. So the default is 10 something. Also I read that when use MultiBeast and chose a mode, that picking imac11 as opposed to Mac Pro 4,1 for instance, can dramatically change (8 to 10 degrees) the cpu normal operating temperature.

 

[Lateralus]

I have the same new config, it runs very hot too with SL or Seven : 53°c idle, 65/75°c under high load.
Everything was fine when i installed windows, idle temp was 40°c. I think something happened when i tweaked the bios for OSX SL install, according to tutorials.
This evening i will try to reset the bios to basic config and monitor temp.

 

[Lateralus]

OSX or seven does not boot with basic bios settings. I must turn on XMP Profile 1 which raise up Vcore2 from 1,5 to 1,65. And other settings (HPET 64, ATA...)

 

[shortass_jr]

i agree with above post the i7s run hot mine sits with a stock cooler at around 45!

 

[tvpo]

I use a good zulman cooler with all proscesers i never use the stock just to be on the safe side. and if i want to over clock oneday i can with out having to buy a new heat sink


just something to consider if u cant fix the problem


Tvpo