Maximum PC

Hi Everyone,

I was doing some video editing(rendering,etc.)and got a little popup warning that I was approaching 60c.
On Intels site they say they can take up to 72c I believe for i5 2500K.
I am running at stock speeds with the stock fan, so is this something to be concerned with?
Thanks for replys

OK, From what I hear, Sandy can take 60-65c under heavy load and at stock everything we should all be good to go.
Of course, cooler is always better!

An i5 can really run at up to 90C without problems. Probably not a good idea to run it quite that hot, but approaching 60C is just fine.

Cool & Thanks!

I was trying to find out a little more about this too. I have an ASUS P8P67 PRO motherboard (with a Core i5-2500K – 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo Boost)) , and I installed the ASUS Ai Suite II software. Really cool software I hadn't gotten to play with until now. Clicking in the taskbar icon I can click on monitor and select both a tab for Sensor and CPU frequency. You can then toggle through all the cores to see what they are running at and monitor the chip temperature as well. When the chip hits 60C though it pops us a disconcerting warning telling me it is running at 60C. Right at 60 is where it is set to run the CPU fan at 100 percent too, and it seems to keep the temp below 70 under full load.

The first time I noticed it was doing some encoding of FRAPs AVIs in handbrake to smaller files. The shear speed at which it pegs the temp is amazing...in about 20 seconds it goes from 28C and 1.6GHz to 4.0GHz on all 4 cores and over 60C giving me the pop up warning. Even at that point the chip still presses on at 4.0GHz or close to it above those temperatures. In Handbrake queues it appears to hit 69C at the top of the range and hold steady near there still running 4.0GHz. I thought that the chip was supposed to clock down when it got to a certain temp, but I guess it hasn’t hit that limit temp yet.

I am kind of confused though. The only setting I changed in the bios was to enable the XMP profile to enable the eXtreme Memory Profile for my DDR 1600 memory. I thought this only affected memory, but maybe not considering the cores are hitting 4.0GHz when Intel says they are only supposed to hit 3.7GHz on turbo boost? Did I accidentally overclock when not meaning to?

I guess I'm wondering if I should be worried about the 68C or not? I was going to try to reseat the stock heatsync that I actually applied my own arctic silver to to get more contact area on the heat spreader than the stock dollop, but it sounds like this may be the normal operating range. I didn't notice this before handbrake, but I have found alt tabbing out of games the same warning is up in the background. I believe I can modify the warning temperature and was wondering if setting it to 70C should be fine. It is getting kind of old getting a warning every time I max the chip out in game or handbrake just because it had to turn the fan to 100%.

I was waiting to install my old Zalaman CNPS9700 cooler until I got a replacement board from the Intel SATA issue so I only have to take the board out the once, but might do it early anyway.

Any thoughts for me or other testimonies from other Sandybridge users?

I can't tell you anything about the apparent overclocking you've got going (my 2600K only hits 3.5GHz under load without any overclock settings), but as for your temperatures: Is that 68C reading from the AI Suite? That's what AI Suite shows on my 2600K with stock cooler when running Prime95 (once again, maxed at 3.5GHz). But I should tell you, most people say CoreTemp or RealTemp is the way to measure such things, and there I get in the upper 70s.

Like you, I'm waiting for my replacement board to install a better cooler. I'll be trying some overclocking for the first time then, I think.

Sounds like I'm within tollerances. I believe changing the XMP profile for my motherboard did run an overclock. The documentation doesn't speak very well to what will overclock and what will not. It really seems to orient this board more toward here are all your overclocking options, which it has a ridiculous amount well implemented, but not very well separated from little things like just upping your memory clock speed to its rated level. I did find a setting for just changing the memory and now my turbo speeds only hit 3.7GHz. Which I find funny that I can tell the difference between that at the 4.0GHz, but it does seem slower.

I have my new replacement board now and the new fan installed and it does seem to help some with the temperature. Staying closer to the mid 60s when running Prime95. The cool thing is that the cores still run up to 3.7 from their 3.3 speed and apparently don't get hot enough to clock back down to standard speed.

The one dissapointing thing I did find out is that the new Asus boards can only control the processor fan speed with a 4 pin fan and my old Zalaman CNPS9700 is only a 3 pin fan. It still works pretty good setting it at a constant level with it's reostat controller so I can hardley hear it. Seems so 'manual' though in our automatic age. Even though it seems to work well.

It can take it for sure, but is really abnormal for stock speeds and rendering. Did you build this or buy it? If you built it, there should be a firm click on the CPU cooler and not just a slight click.