Intel Core i7 Review Thread

[unclewebb]

Does anyone know max temperature?

TjMax can be read from each Core i7 processor but when Core Temp 0.99.3 was originally released, I don't know if Intel had released that information yet. If you want to double check you can try using RealTemp 2.83 which I know reads that new information. Don't copy the new .exe into your old directory or it will use your previous TjMax values from your INI file.

From early testing it seems that the Core i7 has more real world temperature head room available. The previous Core 2 Duo based Quads tended to lose Prime stability when well overclocked at about 70C. I've already seen screen shots of Core i7 running Prime stable at 80C and 90C like Pt1t is running in his screen shot above.

If your Core 2 Duo was running Prime stable, temperature was never an issue and it appears for Core i7, it is even less of an issue. By all means, the cooler the better but if Intel didn't think these could run reliably at 100C then they would lower the TjMax and start thermal throttling 10C or 20C sooner to prevent this.

My only concern from the screen shots so far is excessive voltage. We won't know how much is too much until more retail processors start getting used and the "my processor degraded" reports start coming in.

Edit: Thanks to coolaler for showing us what Core i7 thermal throttling looks like.



http://forum.coolaler.com/showpost.p...8&postcount=12

RealTemp will log any thermal throttling episodes and it looks like core0 at 98C and core1 at 100C both hit the throttle. You definitely want to keep it below this level or else your multi will start to cycle down to 12.0 which will kill performance. Core2 and core3 both hit 93C which is still OK. No throttling has occurred on these two cores.

Good news is that it didn't crash.