are these core 2 duo temps any good

Kaitlin Kaschak459

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Aug 4, 2013
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i have a core 2 duo E8400 being cooled by a corsair A70 with 2 120mm fans in push pull config. im using arctic MX2 TIM, my psu also has a 120mm fan, my idle temps are at 41c at stock temps. any idea whats causing this? cant overclock if stock temps are this high have used speccy hardware monitor and real temp and they all give the same results

my room temp is 70 degrees F

i ran the prime95 "Small FFTs" test for around 20 mins
max load temps as reported by speccy hardware monitor coretemp and realtemp hover between 43c and 44c HWmonitor reports core0 at 44c and core1 at 43c

just wanna make sure these temps are ok before i start overclocking my cpu
 
Solution
41-43 is an excellent load temperature even if you didn't know the actual temperature could be well below that. Of course it could also be "sticking" and well above that instead, but the only numbers you need to look for is you will see 100C for real if the heatsink isn't properly mounted, and exceed 70C if your cooling is marginal. Temperatures below this aren't accurate so simply not worth monitoring on Wolfdales.

The rated Tcase spec for these is 71.4C but Intel never saw fit to provide a TjMax spec. I try to keep things below 80C from the sensor when overclocking but given enough voltage these things are perfectly stable right into throttling at 100C. They are perfectly stable when throttling too, just slower...
It is well known that Wolfdales have a temperature sensor with a lower limit that will read in the 40s even with subzero liquid nitrogen cooling. Worse, the sensors may be "sticky" and suddenly jump 20deg+ after not registering a gradual change.

Intel has stated that these sensors were never designed to be accurate below 50C, and are only used to trigger thermal throttling at 100C. Strange because Conroe before and Nehalem afterward seemed to have sensors that worked fine.
 


so would you say my 41-43 degrees celsius temps on load during prime95 small ff t's testing are ok temps for stock speeds

 
41-43 is an excellent load temperature even if you didn't know the actual temperature could be well below that. Of course it could also be "sticking" and well above that instead, but the only numbers you need to look for is you will see 100C for real if the heatsink isn't properly mounted, and exceed 70C if your cooling is marginal. Temperatures below this aren't accurate so simply not worth monitoring on Wolfdales.

The rated Tcase spec for these is 71.4C but Intel never saw fit to provide a TjMax spec. I try to keep things below 80C from the sensor when overclocking but given enough voltage these things are perfectly stable right into throttling at 100C. They are perfectly stable when throttling too, just slower.

At 4.2GHz I expect a 45nm Core 2 Duo to draw around 130w which is double the original TDP rating.
 
Solution


if i may ask i have my cpu clock speed at 3.15GHz voltage is set to auto i ran prime95 torture stress test for 20mins to test for stability and after the 20mins both coretemp and real temp reported a min of 41 degrees celsius and a max of 49 degrees celsius is this good or bad or what im confused any idea what i should expect my max temps to be for a clock speed between 3.0GHz and 3.5GHz not sure if i wanna go above 3.5 yet i think what i wanna do is ge to 3.5 get it stable for a few days then go from there
 
The temperatures are not real or accurate so can hardly be judged to be good or bad. If you want to monitor low temperatures then that is the wrong chip to do it with as you should not expect the sensor to work properly except near overheating temperatures.

If watching a pretty temperature display is more important than performance, then replace the chip with its 65nm predecessor Conroe which has a perfectly functioning temperature sensor down to below 20 degrees. Those are only ~$5 shipped on eBay nowadays. They use the same amount of power at around 400MHz lower clock vs. 45nm and lack SSE4.1.