Corsair H55 + 6700K: Very high, different temps across cores

arharvey

Prominent
May 20, 2017
2
0
510
Hi there,

I have a Corsair H55 cooler fitted on my stock 6700K. I'm running stress tests in Prime95 (29.1, Blended) and monitoring with HWMonitor

Edit: After reading the CPU Temperature sticky here, I realise that my Prime95 was running unrealistic loads. I have now downloaded the older Prime95 26.6 and running SmallFFT tests only. My results are much better, although still high: http://imgur.com/a/mUVn0

My temperatures seem to be very high under load, reaching as high as 83C. There is a huge difference in temperatures between cores, with a difference of 35C between the hottest and coolest ones at max. Core #1 always seems to be hottest, while core #2 is always the coolest. Here is the HWMonitor output:

http://imgur.com/nUIcl9o

The radiator and fan are mounted above the CPU to the top of the case, blowing out air in a push configuration. Interestingly, the air blown out of the case is cold to the touch even when temperatures of 80+C are been reported... This leads me to suspect that the pump is not working as it should, or that there may be an air pocket somewhere.

Some more details: The fan is running at full speed; the pump is connected to the CPU_OPT connector, which I have locked to full speed in my BIOS settings.

I understand that wildly different core temperatures may be due to the internal thermal paste applied by Intel. Another explanation may be that the cooler is not mounted straight. However I have taken it off, reapplied the thermal paste (Arctic Silver 5) and remounted it. I did this by applying a peas sized amount of paste and slowly screwing the cooler in an X pattern, turning each screw one rotation at a time.

This did reduce the maximum temperature down to 80C which we see now (it previously hit 100C before I quickly stopped the stress test!) but the different core temperatures remain.

Any ideas what else I could try?

Cheers
 

Grumpy_Gam3R

Prominent
Apr 10, 2017
39
0
540
Noctua Air Coolers are much better in my opinion. Less risky too. Have you checked your voltage in bios? Are you overclocked? Driver updates? What's your ambient temperature?