why is one of my cores so much hotter

Solution
Its fine, your CPU was not under high load, so the load was mainly on one core, resulting in higher temps than the rest. No need to worry. I hope those are not idle temps though, ~50C is quite high for that.

jldevoy

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Aug 2, 2011
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Hi,
There's 2 main possible reasons...the protective metal plate over the cpu is rarely exactly flat so there will be a slight variation, also windows tends to use 1 core most of time unless software requires more.