One core >10c hotter

[d3athsd00r]

When my q9550 is at full load using prime95 I have one core that runs over 15C hotter than the coolest core.

Is this normal? Should I try reseating my cpu cooler and adding more arctic silver? It did this before so i tried reseating it but it didn't work apparently.

 

[wevsspot]

razer, one core will always be hotter than the others. that's just the nature of the multicore beast.

 

but.... 10 to 15C difference is quite a bit. There are a few possibilities. Some you can fix, others you cant.

 

1. the cpu ihs isn't making good contact with the processor core - nothing you can do about that

 

2. either the cpu ihs or heatsink isn't perfectly flat causing poor contact area - this can be checked by removing the cpu and heatsink and checking each for flatness using a razorblade or metal engineers ruler. if one or the other isn't flat you can "lap" the surfaces to make them as flat as possible

 

3. over torque or under torque of the heatsink when it's mounted onto the motherboard - this can be fixed by just experimenting with different tightness of the mounting screws

 

4. heatsink mounting screws aren't torqued equally in all four corners - this can be fixed by tightening them like you would when you're putting a tire on a car, tighten each a little at a time alternating from corner to corner in an "X" type of pattern

 

5. too much or too little thermal paste. too much is often worse than not enough. once your heatsink is tightened down on the cpu there should be just a fine/thin paste across the entire cpu ihs

 

are you using an aftermarket heatsink or the oem intel heatsink?

[d3athsd00r]

I'm using a cooler master v8.

Thanks for all the possibilities. Didn't know that too much thermal paste was bad. Or that over tightening was bad.