Hello, members of the TH community, I recently took the plunge into building a PC for gaming with an i5-3350P. I put it together yesterdayThe build went mostly well, but there was a massive problem when seating the processor heatsink.
Foolishly, I went for the stock Intel heatsink and...yup, people were right, these things are just plain horrendous. One of the four pins simply didn't line up with the holes in my motherboard (an ASrock Z75 Pro3 for the record). Not at all. I foolishly tried to force it in, and the entire pin BENT (as in, the white part that's supposed to go through the hole bent and couldn't go through it anymore), and I simply said "screw" it and only tightened down three of the four pins. Then my mobo accidentally shorted out due to faulty standoff placement, and when I took the cooler off (thinking it was the problem), I didn't think to clean off the slightly-melted thermal paste and put a new coat on.
So I finished the build with two major faux pas. But the thing was working great, I loaded some of my old games onto it and was having a blast with my GTX760 chewing up everything I threw at it.
But today I thought "might as well check the temps" and downloaded a few temperature reading programs.
My CPU idles at 65c and regularly gets to the 70s. Right now, it's reading in the 50s, but that's probably because I haven't done anything with it. When gaming, it skyrockets to 105c and stays there. This is obviously not good. Weirdly enough, the heatsink feels cool to the touch, which made me think that I simply had a faulty sensor, but the cpu consistently throttles itself whenever I am gaming, so I'm forced to admit that I bungled the heatsink installation big time.
Oddly enough, the thing seems fine. Even when it's running at 105c for 10+ minutes the CPU never shuts down or even throttles enough to adversely affect gameplay. But am I actually damaging my CPU? I'm gonna get a new cooler and some thermal paste eventually but I really hope this thing is salvageable. Everything else in the build works perfectly, I'd hate for the CPU to metaphorically blow up on me.
Thanks in advance.
Foolishly, I went for the stock Intel heatsink and...yup, people were right, these things are just plain horrendous. One of the four pins simply didn't line up with the holes in my motherboard (an ASrock Z75 Pro3 for the record). Not at all. I foolishly tried to force it in, and the entire pin BENT (as in, the white part that's supposed to go through the hole bent and couldn't go through it anymore), and I simply said "screw" it and only tightened down three of the four pins. Then my mobo accidentally shorted out due to faulty standoff placement, and when I took the cooler off (thinking it was the problem), I didn't think to clean off the slightly-melted thermal paste and put a new coat on.
So I finished the build with two major faux pas. But the thing was working great, I loaded some of my old games onto it and was having a blast with my GTX760 chewing up everything I threw at it.
But today I thought "might as well check the temps" and downloaded a few temperature reading programs.
My CPU idles at 65c and regularly gets to the 70s. Right now, it's reading in the 50s, but that's probably because I haven't done anything with it. When gaming, it skyrockets to 105c and stays there. This is obviously not good. Weirdly enough, the heatsink feels cool to the touch, which made me think that I simply had a faulty sensor, but the cpu consistently throttles itself whenever I am gaming, so I'm forced to admit that I bungled the heatsink installation big time.
Oddly enough, the thing seems fine. Even when it's running at 105c for 10+ minutes the CPU never shuts down or even throttles enough to adversely affect gameplay. But am I actually damaging my CPU? I'm gonna get a new cooler and some thermal paste eventually but I really hope this thing is salvageable. Everything else in the build works perfectly, I'd hate for the CPU to metaphorically blow up on me.
Thanks in advance.
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