Do Jumping temps mean faulty mbob/cpu?

[dandare]

So, I bought a new setup, Gigabyte G1. Sniper 3 Z77 and i5 3570K - Noctua NH-14D cooler. running at 3.4 with the boost clock enabled (default)

Both Real temps and HW monitor are showing the temps fluctuating wildly at idle. going lower than ambient (13 dgrees in some cases) and as high as 48 degrees.

Temps are changing every split second, sometimes in jumps of over 10 dgrees, like 25-32-18-28-40-35-32-37-42-25-48 on all cores.

Under Prime95 large in place ftt test cores remain more stable around 54-60 degrees depending on test phase. never exceeded 60, and only fluctuating by 2-4 degrees at a time ather than 10+

I spoke to overclockers UK (retailer where componentes were bought) and they have told me it is likely a faulty board or cpu. - now i am desperate to try and see if there is another solution.reason as I have just suffered two weeks of diagnosis over a "fulty" gtx 60, that seems to have turned out to be a dodgy psu. I really want to use this rig properly over christmas and do not want to rma it.

I have re -seated the heat sink once, and am going to try again.

Any advice as to what could cause this would be apreciated

 

[13thmonkey]

all chipset drivers updated?

seems odd to me, the ivb processors do bounce around a lot, but not that much.

 

[dandare]

all chipset drivers updated?

seems odd to me, the ivb processors do bounce around a lot, but not that much.

yes, chpset is latest inf update for 7 series mobo's from intel direct as it was updated version over one off gigabytes website.

I also noted that on bios f5 (may) the mobo bios displays cpu temps as 26 dgrees stable, but the hw monitor and realtemps still jump.

On latest f8g or previous f7 bios the temps are shown as 35+ in bios and jumping in windows

 

[dandare]

As an update, I have just re-installed windows and it has made no difference. temps using hw monitor and real temps still both show fluctuations up to from sub 20 to 40+ and that is without any chipset drivers installed.

added to this there is weiredness going on in the bios. on the main pc health status page it shows the remp as 26 dgrees, but in the MIB tweaker overview it shows the core temps as 40-41, 30, 40-41, 40-41 on cores 0-3 respectivley.