E8400 temp question

[thepieguy]

Hey, I've got an e8400 with the stock heatsink, which I removed the thermal pad and applied AS5. It's all brand new, a few days old, so it's definitely not past the "break-in" if that makes a difference. HWMonitor shows one core running as 34c and the other as 38c at idle. Is this difference between the two normal? I'm wondering if the heatsink is mounted properly. I did make sure that all four tabs were all the way through, but you know how that goes. I don't intend to do much for overclocking, obviously with the stock, but I might try to bump up to 3.6ghz. Thanks for any help.

 

[Conumdrum]

Yes, up to 10C between cores is acceptable under load. All depends on the IHS when it was assembled in the chip.

Load the chip up and check again, sounds fine to me.

 

[thepieguy]

Thank you. I ran 3dmark2006 and both cores evened out at 49c.

 

[kbits]

Maybe your 2nd is stuck and can't go below 38c. This happen a lot on those CPU.

 

[Conumdrum]

3DMark doesn't load the processor very much. Get Orthos and run it, small FFT's. There are other proggies, but this one is easy enough

 

[thepieguy]

I just ran Prime95 small FFT's for 10 minutes. Both cores maxed out at 57c. If I try overclocking a little bit, what stress test do you run for a longer period of time to test system stability?

 

[Conumdrum]

Prime, small FFT, blend, and memtest for ram. Run for 12 hours each one.

If you OC the GPU:

GPU Furmark, loop for an hour. ATI tool too, artifact tester.

 

[thepieguy]

Thanks, that's good to know. I pushed my Sapphire 4830 to 700mhz GPU and 950mhz memory, at that point I couldn't notice any artifacts in 3dmark. But I'll have to try those other programs.

 

[im_just_jokin]

i have same cpu, idle cores ate 37.c for both but under load diff of about 5.c between the two