Max wattage i5-2500k

[jsanthara]

The TDP is 95w. I am looking to overclock and I was wondering how much wattage is too much. At 4.1 GHz, HWMonitor puts the wattage at 159 (100% load). At stock speeds (3.3 - 3.4 GHz), under full load, the highest I got was 109w. I don't really know very much about this, I just want to make sure I am not going to destroy my chip. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[IntelEnthusiast]

TDP is thermal design power this is the amount of heat that the cooling system in a computer is required to dissipate. The higher the TDP the greater the cooling that is needed to deal with it. So something like the Intel® Pentium® D 960 that had a TDP of 130w was the reason we started to look at better overall cooling in BTX than the Intel Core i7-2600K which has a TDP of 95w. So if I am overclocking a processor that has a TDP of 95w normally I might find that when I overclock it I might push that up to 130w or more when I overclock it requiring me to get a better cooling solution to deal with it.

So don’t confuse power draw with TDP they aren’t the same animal.

Christian Wood
Intel Enthusiast Team

 

[jsanthara]

So... should I worry about 159w on a i5-2500k @ 4.1 GHz?

 

[IntelEnthusiast]

Except for the increase in power requirement (so more wattage from the PSU) you really dont need to worry about the how much wattage the processor is taking. Now changing the vcore (or core voltage) can damage the processor quickly so you want to be very careful on changing this on the processor. I advise that you go over to the overclockers board and read about overclocking the Intel® Core™ i5-2500K also you can use this tool to help make sure that you get a good enough PSU for your needs http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp . OCZ makes some very good PSUs and unless you try to do SLI or Xfire you should be in good shape.

Christian Wood
Intel Enthusiast Team

 

[jsanthara]

That's what I wanted to know. Thank you for the information.

 

[jsanthara]

Best answer selected by jsanthara.