Core i7 temperature

[ddavid]

Hello everyone,

Two days ago, I have assembled my first PC. Well, it's the first PC I have assembled myself, anyway . Everything seems to be working fine, in spite of the lack of support and installation guides some hardware manuals provide.

I am, however, a bit worried about my CPU temperatures. I have a core i7 940 installed on a Gigabyte EX58-extreme motherboard. I'm using the CPU cooler that came with the CPU. At first, when I checked the core temperatures (using speedfan) I nearly had a heart attack. All CPU temperatures were around 90-100 degrees celcius!
After a little searching on the web, I found a thread on a forum where someone had the same problem, and solved it by removing an unused RAID driver. I checked my device management, and I too had two storage device controller drivers installed, one of which was a raid driver. I'm not using a raid setup however, so I removed both, figuring if there was one needed it would reinstall when I scanned for new hardware.
The gigabyte controller did reinstall, and the intell raid controller did not, and indeed, my CPU temperatures dropped.
The problem is, I thik they're still quite high. I'm not sure if they are (maybe it's normal), but core 0, 1 and 2 idle around 52-55 degrees.

Speedfan shows some more temperatures, but they're labeled "temp", "temp1", "temp2" and "temp3". I honestly have no idea what these temperatures represent.


Also, it only shows 3 cores? I thought the i7 was quad core? Or is there one core without a thermometer?

Does anyone know if these are normal temperatures for this CPU? Or should I be worried?

Kind regards,

David

 

[dragonsprayer]

first off you wasted your money on the 940 - anyone out there the 920 is just as fast. Now that, that is out of the way -- yes you should be worried as your system will be unstable and lock up. You should expect random freezing! First off get a better heat sink!

second post photos and list of parts and specs!

since you did not use the correct cooling you could slap on a water cooler ---90-100c is normal for 4-4.2ghz machine with sub par cooling: subpar is just about anything with the i7.


set your voltage to 1.33 at 3.8ghz or higher
or set your voltage to 1.22 or lower if your below 3.4ghz

turn off hyper threading


are sure you installed the heat sink correctly? typcally you do see numbers like that! water cooling or better air cooling is key with the i7.

raid driver has nothing to do with cpu temps

 

[dragonsprayer]

if you water cool you do not need to do this:

fedex smashed this last week!


try the coolit domino!!!

 

[ddavid]

Okiedokie, turns out my heatsink wasn't properly attached.. I feel so damn stupid. Anyway, the temps are quite alright now, around 40 degrees idle, 80 degres load max. However, I still get random freezing.. Do you suppose I damaged the CPU? I've only just thought of this, I've tried every software solution first.. But I keep getting lock-ups. I'm thinking it's either my CPU or my GPU, but since I got my CPU up to temperatures you could roast a pig on, I guess it's more likely to be the source of my trouble.

The lockups leave no trace of error, just a windows event viewer entry saying "the previous system shutdown was unexpected". Not even a crashdump :S. I haven't even overclocked the CPU, and I've tried stability tests, but the PC won't run without jamming up for more than an hour.. Pretty safe to say it's unstable..

Further system information:

Motherboard: GigaByte EX58 - Extreme (Bios v7, last version)
GPU: ASUS NVidia ENGTX295
RAM: Corsair Dominator ddr3 1600MHz, 3 x 2 GB
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB SATA2
Optical: LG BluRay GGW-H20L

and a Wireless LAN card:
LinkSys WMP300N

I've tried running without the blu-ray, without the network card, nothing seems to work.. I'm really bummed out by this, since I can't get a lock on the specific problem.. But do you reckon it's the CPU?