Maximum PC

Friend of mine has a i7 920 on a Asus P6X58D Prem. board using a Artic Cooling Freezer 7 PRO Rev.2. It's stock clocked so there's no OC'ing going on and yet his idle temps can sit at around 130F degrees. We had taken it apart and cleaned it out cause he sucks at keep shit clean and even changed out the thermal paste cause that's what he wanted but too me the temps seem really high. When he plays Battlefield 3 his temps will get as high as 150+ and to me it just seems really hot. Now I know some cpu's that use more wattage can of course run hotter and I was wondering if that's the problem or maybe it's the cpu cooler. oddly enough I installed Final Wire 64 and his fan speed was running at around 2700 rpm's and I checked the spec on fan from the Freezer 7 which shows there max speed at 2200 rpm's. That just doesn't sound right but I thought I would just put that in. Now with the side panel off of the case which is a RaidMax (kinda looks like the RAIDMAX SMILODON) I put my box fan on it with it at top speed and was able to get the temps down on idle to 114F degrees and when I took it off we got temps of around 125F+. I did a burn-in for a few minutes just to see the temps this thing would make and got as hot as 210F degrees which I was just like OMG and it's not even OC'ed. This was brought on by the fact that his computer had crashed on em, it was a hard lockup and not a bios shut down even though he claims when it rebooted it gave a error that it crashed cause of the cpu heat and asked if he wanted to restart in normal or safe mode, but as we know the bios would have shut the whole system and yet it was a Hard Lockup cause everything was still running with the exception of the LED's in the front of the case in which he said they went off. Now one odd thing was I tried looking for the Thermal Protection settings in the bios for this computer and I couldn't find the damn settings. He's got the latest firmware for the bios but I looked in the cpu monitoring section and I couldn't find it for the life of me. So anybody got any suggestions.

Did you build this for him? It may explain a lot. We use Celsius, and most of the world does too. Start using it please. And paragraphs.

I'm not alarmed until you state 210F during some mystery stress test (99C). The stock cooler will do much better than that, so re-seat the Artic Cooling Freezer 7 PRO Rev.2 for him with some IC Diamond. The 920 is a bit aged and no TIM will last very long, so don't expect it to.

No i didn't build it for em. We did take the Heat Sink off and cleaned the fins and around the edges of the fan. Plz don't comment about the cpu being old cause this is the system he uses and can't afford anything right now so this is what he's using till he decides otherwise.

We did apply a new coat of thermal paste to it and I have no clue what you mean by mystery tress test. If your not familiar with Final Wire64 or AIDA64 they bought out Everest maybe you've heard of Everest, anyway we used the simple burn in test to stress the cpu and at one point did reach 98C degrees at one point.

So you think the temps are fine with the exception of the stressed temp? Even though he'll never see those kinds of temps really even in game play.

What Chumly is saying about the i7-920 is that it's been around for five years, not that it sucks, so any original thermal paste since time of building would probably have crapified by now. He wasn't putting down your buddies' processor. The i7 x58 platform is still friggin' beast.

We have all heard of Everest, by Lavalys, and that is not the stress-test we're used to around here. The fact is, you didn't mention it in your first post, so don't get snippy when Chumly mentions a "mystery" stress test. We're not psychic.

Especially here in the OC'ing forum we use Prime95 with RealTemp and deal in Celsius.

What is your friends air flow like into his case? Do you know the case he uses in particular? Are all his fans as intake, exhaust, other? What thermal paste are you using?

Generally, at least on my old Noctua, I could OC my i7-920 to 3.2GHz w/HT on and never pass 80C on stress tests. The temps your stating now do seem particularly high. Have you used CPU-Z to determine whether or not he has a C0/C1 stepping 920? If so, there's part of your explanation.

And, just 'cause it never hurts to ask...your buddy has a fan on his heatsink, right?

Also, check the voltages in the BIOS...it's not overclocked NOW, but your buddy may have tried before.

Actually I did say that we changed the thermal paste out and I guess I should have stated that I was still using FinalWire when I did the stress test. And how much of a difference could it be if I'm using Prime95 or FinalWire to see what kind of temps. were getting running at full speed.

Did you bother to do any of the things I asked you to or just posting a rebuttal?