Well I recently upgraded from a Core2Duo rig to a new Core i7 based system. Basically went with July's Premium Player or whatever it was. Core i7 930 on an Asus P6X58D-E, 6GB DDR3-1600, 850w XFX PSU Running Win7Pro 64 bit, if that matters. Stock cooler, for now. 3 120mm case fans - 2 in at the front, 1 out at the rear. Using CoreTemp or RealTemp I've seen the temperature of Core 0 get as high as 92 degrees celcius while doing nothing more than playing Counter-Strike Source. The fan is connected, and yes, I've reseated the cooler several times. Contact with the IHS seems to be pretty good. I pulled the cooler out and cleaned it up and put some Arctic Silver on which brought the temps down a bit but running Prime95 (8 threads) I can still get all 4 cores into the high 80's before I chicken out and stop. CPU is running at 2.8ghz (2.93 or whatever it turbo's to) and stock voltage, for now. The machine, remarkably, is completely stable so far. Rock solid. The temperature just scares me - my E6600 @ 3.2ghz with a slightly modded Zalman cooler rarely got above 40. Are these things just hot as hell and the Intel cooler barely up to the task? Should I invest in something beefier ASAP? Or is my mobo probably reading high or something? I've just thrown a stack of cash at this thing so I'm not hugely in the mood to go and spend another pile of money on watercooling it...
dont worry dude, you dont need to water cool it. your problem is the stock cooler, check out the hardware section under cooling for reviews on cpu cooling solutions. now you wont kill your chip even if its running at 90c, but you will definately lower the life span. if you keep your cpu cool it will outlast everything in your setup. i personally think the titan fenrir is still best bang for buck at $45, keeps my 125w cpu at 30-45c idle to load. phenom 965BE. alternately ive seen some cheap coolermaster v8's lying around. once you get a better cooler you should think of overclocking that chip, i7's are normally good for lots of extra free performance.
Get a Corsair H50. It's a easy setup and cheap CPU water cooler. I love mine and a couple of mates have bought it since and thay are all happy.
then you must never do anything with it lol mines got a H50 on with idles of around 35-40C depending on room temp, although i need to clean it now as its dusty again. i get around 65 under heavy load.
The temps you have aren't dangerous or anything - an i7 can run perfectly fine at that temperature. The stock cooler is your problem - intel coolers are notoriously bad. Get a Titan Fenrir and you will notice quite a difference
