With a very good air cooler or all-in-one water cooler, you’re looking at a heat limited voltage cap of about 1.25 V- 1.3v . At that voltage with air or AIO cooling, you’ll be seeing temperatures in the upper 80′s to lower 90′s (°C) range under normal full processor load.

The easiest way to see how far your particular chip will go is to set the voltage manually at 1.25 V, set all cores to run the same multiplier, then start raising that multiplier until you run into instability.

1. I used Aida64 free for a while, but I love it; so, I paid for the basic license. I still love it - haha - there are a lot of voltages you can't see without the full license, as well as HDD temps. OCCT will work the dog out of your machine, as will Aida64.

2. While that Noctua air-cooler is phenomenal, remember that due to the sheer mass of the heat sink, and the fact that heat has to conduct a long way to the fins, temperature spikes will be more extreme. The presence of heat pipes helps (adding an element of convection), but conduction is the least efficient heat-transfer method available to such a system, and it's the primary method by which a PC heat sink works.

You mentioned using a line, and then slightly rotating the heat sink back and forth to settle it. It is my understanding that you only want to help the heat sink settle with rotation using the dot method, as smearing the line of TIM could trap air bubbles more easily. The only way to find out would be to re-paste, using a different method.

So, judging from your temperatures, and what little I know about nominal temperatures for socket 2011 CPUs, it seems that those are pretty normal readings. I don't really use Prime95 anymore - general stress testing: Realbench, and stability testing: Aida64. I've managed to let go of the OCD-driven insanity of trying to get Prime95 to run stable and cool for 10+ hours, since it's not a realistic test of your computer's abilities.

Z

Thanks guys, yeah I found some more info last night about newer versions of Prime (I just upgraded from the 4 year old one I had ooops) running some AVX instruction that pretty much nukes the CPU temp-wise. Even found a help post on Intel's forums about it. I don't normally use it I guess I was just double checking that everything is working right. I have to say I'm confused on the AIDA thing. Everyone keeps saying there is a free one but all I find on their site is the 3 versions that all have a 30 day limited functionality trial. I will say I get good temps with IBT, OCCT, and Realbench. Or at least they seem like they should be good considering the chip is basically overclocked to 4.4 at 1.18v since it's running at 4.4 even when all cores are under load.

Good news flyinion and I agree with Dr. Zchivago re Prim95.
Yes your right about AIDA64, that's what people are doing, using the limited functionality version for a 30 day trial. You should only need it for a couple of days anyhow.

I found the credit card method to be the easiest and most reliable Fly. But I guess everyone has there favorites.

Rick S.