Hi guys. I finished building a gaming rig a few days ago and I've been trying it out with the stock intel heatsink at stock speed. I'm currently getting around 40-50 degrees Celsius in idle and somewhere around 60-70 (sometimes even going up to 75) under load. As I haven't built a computer in a very long time (I'm still amazed there's mouse support in BIOS) I'm kind of being as paranoic as a possessive girlfriend.
The mobo I'm using is Asus Z97-A. I decided to fiddle with some of the settings and the fan expert thingy to see if I can get any improvements. I did win a few degrees by switching from the silent profile to turbo so that's good and all. (freaked out a bit when I ran the fan tuning utility and my temp went up to 88 degrees for a brief moment.
I know the stock Intel fan is really crappy but I'm wondering if the temps are supposed to be like this with it and also wondering if I should bother changing the thermal paste until my EVO 212 arrives.
Just wait for the new cooler. That test run loads the CPU more than almost any regular task would, and it was only up there for a short period. Don't overclock until the new cooler comes on of course. If that will just take a couple of days then you could, if you feel like taking the temperatures down a notch, turn off the Turbo function by either disabling Turbo in the BIOS, or edit the power profile in Windows' power management to set max CPU level at 99% (which also in practice turns off the turbo).
My own 4690K happens to run with a Hyper 212 EVO and it's doing nicely at 4.5 GHz with about 1.25V. I'm still tweaking some settings but 4.5 seems like where it will end up, putting more value on low noise than maximum speed. I also use a dialed down fan curve (Fan Xpert 3 really works its magic) and am seeing temps while playing Battlefield 4 up towards but not above 80C, with a lot of heat rising up from the graphics card area.
Having used much bigger coolers in the past I'm quite impressed with the "little" 212 Evo. I got tired of having a cramped area around the CPU and gave it a chance. An installation tip is to check closely so that the mounting is aligned for the right socket model right away. Mine came preset for the old 1155 socket.
Thanks for the prompt response. Another thing I've noticed is that the temps fluctuate a lot. I'm beginning to think that I have not re-seated it properly or the paste it came with is more terrible than I had expected. I'll try to disable turbo to see if it helps with the temps.
Guess I'll make due until my new cooler arrives. Apparently Turbo Mode was disabled but instead the mobo itself oced the CPU to 4.1. Just set that down to stock 3.5 and won around 8 degrees. I'll make due with that until my cooler arrives.
Meanwhile something interesting happened. After making the change I was stuck in an automatic repair loop (Win 8.1) for a while. Any ideas what could cause this ?