Hyper 212 Evo Questions

This is perfectly normal
idle should be 30-35c Excellent
When overclocked or during stress testing temp can rise to upper 80s don't panic as in normal day to da use you will observe much lower load temp.
Try Prime 95 : run few hours
Linx : max memory test
Intel burn in test.

Thanks

your actual temperature does not matter, what matters is your delta temperature (temperature - room temperature).

For example, my system right now is an i7 2600 (non-K) running at ~4GHz, and my temp is at ~45*c (game running in the background), and my room temp is at 68*f or 20*c, so my delta temperature is at 25*c. This is important because if my room temp was 75*f or 24*c, then my CPU temp would be at 50*c rather than 45*c.

At any rate, 30*c at idle would be pretty warm unless you are in an 85*f room, which is pretty warm, and too warm to safely run most modern electronics. Idle on my system is at a delta temp of ~2-4*c. I am running a 212 EVO, but I have 2 corsair fans on it as well, so my temps would be a bit lower than average.


Still, if your idle temp with an aftermarket cooler is sitting above delta 5*c then there is a chance something is not right.
1) is your system overclocked? did you mess with voltages?
2) are there any airflow issues? are you recycling hot air back in the system? Are you able to pump fresh room temperature air into your box? Is your exhaust obstructed by a wall or a desk?
3) Are you sure your thermal paste is OK? did you have old paste that you forgot to remove? did you add your own paste to what was already on the 212 block? did you touch the 212 to your CPU, remove it, and then put it back on? All of these types of things can cause issues. Too much paste, too little paste, or paste with air pockets can all cause issues, so be careful during installation. Remember that paste is the enemy... it is just less of an enemy than air is. So only use just enough paste to push the air out from between the CPU and cooler, anything more than that is going to act like a blanket, preventing heat from dissipating through the 212 block.

Hope that helps!

Tottally normal at idle. What about under load?

No, because people will feel comfortable at different room temps, but you still want your CPU temps to be around 30C at idle.

^ Good luck with that when the room itself is 30°C.
I would go so far to say that when it comes to idle temperatures, the ambient temperature is the most important factor. No matter how good your cooling is, you cant go lower than ambient temperature unless your using Phase Change or chilled liquid cooling. For a 212 EVO, I would expect idle temps between 10 and 15°C above ambient for idle.

To demonstrate the point, my custom water-cooled 3570k can hit 40°C at idle on some hot days.

I'm going to agree with CaedenV here. The delta T is more important. If it's 90F in your room you will not be getting 30C idle, but if it is 60F in your room then 30C will be a little warm.

Prime 95 would be good. Just run hwmonitor at the same time to monitor your temps.

The only time your actual system temps matter is for the maximum temps. For example, you do not want to run a system over 90*c for extended amounts of time, or peak over 100*c for any amount of time. When you start hitting these temps then there is a chance of damaging the hardware. It really scares me when I get a CPU temp above 70*c or a GPU temp much above 80*c... I know they are rated to work just fine under those conditions, but that is pretty warm. Thankfully CPUs have thermal throttling, which makes it nearly impossible to do any major damage... but you will loose a ton of performance.
However, (as others have already mentioned) it is impossible to go below ambiant temperature. The reality of the matter is that your registered temperature is merely displaying the aggregate temperature of all loads on the system. Heatsinks do not merely take heat from one source and then put it off to another one... that would be impossible for a hunk of metal to do. Heatsinks merely do their best to equalize the heat load that they are a part of. This means that if you are in a hot room then your temperature gague will display the load put on it by both the CPU in addition to whatever the load (temp) is of the air in the room. And so when the system if completely off the absolute lowest temperature you can achieve (and should achieve) would be room temperature. When the system is idle then it will be room+idle, when under heavy load then the temp will be room+load. The ONLY way to determine how much load/temp the CPU is adding to the system is to subtract your ambient temp from it.

If you are in a 30*c room then there is no way to get a CPU to idle at 30*c, it will always have a delta of +5-10*c, and it would be perfectly appropriate to have a temperature rating of 35-40*c on the CPU at idle. If you have your equipment in a nice cool basement (where I keep most of mine) then the ambient temp will be closer to 18-20*c then your actual temp should be 25-30*c.

There is however a correction to be made on my origonal post:
When I made my initial post I thought that 30*c was a bit on the warm side for idle, but I forgot that this was an Ivy Bridge part. Ivy Bridge CPUs use a poor quality thermal paste between the CPU die and the little metal heat spreader. This paste (compared to solder which is used on most Intel CPUs) adds a few degrees to the temperature, and so 30*c is a perfectly normal idle temp for the CPU in question for an average room that is kept at 68-72*f.

@OP
So it sounds like everything is fine, but if your load temps are high then you may still have a problem. If it slowly gets warmer and warmer and/or you do not feel any warmth on the heatsink then there is too much paste. If your different cores (when under an even/full load) have vastly different temps (more than a 10*c difference) then your paste was not smushed down evenly and should be reapplied. If when under load your temps shoot up and down very quickly then it means that you probably have air pockets between the CPU and heatsink.

Hope that helps

Look up Intel Burn Test. Great program, and good at maxing out your HT cores as well as your physical cores. Run Hardware Monitor or some other temp monitoring program while doing the test to make sure that things are working well. There are no real world applications that will put that kind of load on your system, so it should show you your maximum possible temperatures, and when gaming or other loads then your CPU should run well below the temps that Burn Test will give you.

Load temps for CPUs:
60s to low 70s are exceptional, don't expect them, but if it happens then be happy.
70s to mid 80s are perfectly normal
85-90 is technically fine, but a little high
90-99 is technically within spec while under load, but I would be concerned and take action to get them lower
100+ (especially with an aftermarket cooler) then something is not right, and you should look at voltages, your cooler etc. Running at 100-110 for brief amounts of time is technically OK, but you are just asking for trouble, and for extended times then damage will occur.
120+ You have blown something up. Time for a new CPU, and possibly motherboard.