Just built a PC - i7 950 running at 100 right out of the box

Yeah, 100C is pretty high. I would just slap on an aftermarket cooler just for piece of mind. My CM Hyper 212 cost just $27....

I checked the seating twice - it really is seated correctly.

Your stock heatsink should not be running your cpu that high. I know it has been said all ready but make sure the 4 pins in the heatsink are locked in.

Thanks guys. You're all probably right; I replaced the stock heat sink with a $20 heat sink hastily purchased from Best Buy and I'm running Prime95 as we speak at a stable 55 degrees. I'm really not sure what the original problem was. I probably mis-applied the thermal paste. Actually my CPU didn't come with thermal paste, and the instructions did not mention it at all, but I did have some on there. I wasn't careful with it though. I'm surprised it made such a huge difference.

I did run my CPU for probably a half hour at probably 100 degrees, before I thought to check temperatures. Do you think that did any appreciable damage?

The CPU did come with thermal paste, actually. It was on the bottom of the stock heatsink.

I bought a Megahalems originally, and it did come with paste. Unfortunately I over-tightened something when installing the megahalems, so had to remove it and use the stock. I didn't re-apply any paste when I did so, because the CPU still had the layer of paste from the megahalems install. But I guess that didn't work out so well.

When I installed my new Corsair A70 tonight, I wiped all the paste remnants from the CPU and started over with the paste included with the A70. That seems to have done it. The original problem was almost certainly about the TIM.

Not sure what you mean - didn't see anything on there. You mean some micro-thin layer of paste pre-applied at the factory?

In any case, I put the stock heat sink on top of a pre-existing layer of paste left over from my failed installation of the megahalems. I figured that would have been good enough and am still surprised that it wasn't.

Nope.

It's the grey stuff applied in three stripes:

If you put the stock heatsink onto the processor, with leftover thermal paste from another heatsink, and without taking the pre-applied thermal paste off the stock heatsink, I'm not at all surprised it didn't work out too well.


You always clean off your CPU and heatsink, then apply a new, even and thin layer of TIM onto your processor. There are a variety of ways not doing this can cause problems.


In your case your thermal paste may have dried out, and very likely had an uneven spread. Either of those things can cause pretty large temperature changes.

Just remember to clean both your heatsink and CPU off before applying TIM in the future, and don't use too much.

100c is very hot, 90 is already critical, so be thankful you taught about it half an hour, if you continued using it longer with that temp then it will fail.
the maximum temperature is the temp the cpu can work without burning. The lower the cpu temperature, the better.
Good quality CPU coolers and the correct use of thermal grease will make your CPU to work way below its maximum rated temperature.
When the CPU works above the maximum admissible temperature set by its manufacturer, the following problems can occur.
-Reduction of CPU life-span
-Random freezes
-Random resets
other cases of PCs giving the infamous Blue Screen of Death while you are loading or installing the operating system because the CPU is overheated. Another typical overheating scenario is the computer working correctly and then after some time it starts to malfunction.

Best answer selected by omgtifb.

Yes there should have been a pre applied pad of interface material on the heat sink like the photo above but like I said the one we got had none at all.
Using the old and if there was a pad on the heat sink would have made gaps between the cpu and the sink thats probably why you had issues.
I think Tjmax is 105 on the 950 so you probably stressed it pretty good it may end up being ok though i hope it works out for you.
I guess this should be considered a lesson learned about TIM application.