My friends family computer with a i7-3770 has been running really hot for a long time and crashing due to temperature for the last month or so, however I suspect that it's been running very hot for the last couple of years that they've owned the computer simply because my friend referred to it as some shit home pc when it in fact is a decent gaming pc due to having a GTX-560 so my guess is that the CPU has been throttling since day one.
What effect will this have on the lifetime of the CPU and the general performance of it? I'm asking since my friend wanted to get a good gaming pc of his own, so I was thinking of making the family computer his and then the family gets some fairly cheap multitasking PC, but I'm not sure about it since I don't know if the CPU has been severely damaged from the high temperatures.
well, the cpu throttled back to prevent damage and windows bluescreens to also prevent damage. The lifespan reduction of the CPU probably isn't major enough to where it would fail before you would decide to upgrade to a newer cpu anyway
The CPU -should- have avoided damage to itself by throttling, but considering how long it has been running hot there could be some potential for damage there. What I would do before dumping a ton of cash into a new system, is buy a cheap ~$30 cpu cooler like a Hyper 212 or similar, and install that. Then once the temps are back in a reasonable range, run a stress test like prime95 for 24hrs and see if it still crashing. If its not, then a 3770 is more than enough for gaming and you could put more money towards a new GPU.
At stock clock speeds though the stock intel cooler should be able to keep the CPU sufficiently cool, so is it possible you have a fan or something causing the internal case temps to be excessive? What temps is it sitting at for idle/load right now?
My guess is that the thermal paste wasn't applied properly, because it was using some custom cooler (I have no idea what the name is, but it resembled the shape of a stock cooler), I told them to get some thermal paste for now, I'll try to check back with them as soon as I can and see if the temperatures are down, if they aren't I'll tell them to get a hyper 212 evo then I'll make sure to run the prime95 test as you suggested and check if the CPU is fine and will then decide how to continue. Thanks for the help!
Edit: the temps were around 80C when idle and the bios screen showed 90C right before startup, max temp when using google chrome was around 100C