DescentBB

Hi everyone.

I recently got a Core i7 4770 Haswell CPU (thanks to a friend that gave it to me for cheap!) and it works very nicely.
Yesterday I was making some testing with HWMonitor running on my secondary monitor, and I noticed that this CPU is hotter than my previous i3 (the i3 was a 2120, Sandy Bridge), that was installed on the very same case.

Of course I know this is a much powerful procesor that the one I had, so it should not be that surprising if it runs a bit hotter, but still, I wanna be sure if the temperature readings I got on the i7 are healthy or at least normal.

On idle I get 45°c, 65°c~ on gaming, and up to 81°c on heavy use.
When browsing Facebook that is very heavy on scripting I get 57°c approximately, 65° to 68°c when playing Overload (as an example), and finally from 78° to 81°c when doing lots of heavy tasks. My 'heavy tasks' consisted of browsing Facebook with Overload & Cemu Wii U emulator (loading shaders) running at the same time, while converting an MP4 h264 video to MPEG-2 in the background, and jumping between tasks constantly, with CPU usage up to 90%.

As a side note, my ambient room temperature is about 22°c, but on very sunny summer days it can get up to 28°/29°c

EDIT: To check on a more stressing situation, even if useless and unpractical , I added to the previous test (Facebook, Cemu, Overload, and encoding to MPG2) Nero burning a disk, Winamp playing a song and another video encoder encoding from h264 to h264 mp4, all at the same time. In that 100% usage situation I got readings of up to 88°c overall, 90°c on one of the cores.
Of course this was a forced situation than on everyday normal use would not happen, but I ran it as both a CPU capacity and temperature test (and just for very few minutes).

EDIT2: I've been using 'normal' (not Silent nor Full Speed) profiles for both CPU and Case fan speed on the BIOS settings for those tests

The easier way to see just how hot your CPU will go is to fire up a copy of prime95 (v2.66 is the regular, v2.85 is AVX==even hotter but less realistic) and run its self test. It is one task that will max out all 8 threads on your CPU and generates as much heat as possible (it also can frequently detect if you system is unstable in any way).

With that out of the way, the problem is more likely than not the thermal compound between the CPU core itself and the heat spreader you see on the top of it. The i3-2120 is a smaller dual core, but more importantly it (and all chips in prior to the 3rd generation) was soldered to its head spreader instead of using thermal compound like the 3rd generation and up use. Thermal compound is better than nothing (air), but practically an insulator compared to joining it with solder. That is why it is not uncommon for i3s/i5s/i7s of the third generation and up (including the 4770) to run dramatically hotter than the prior generations despite in many cases drawing less power.

There is a solution, but its not for the faint of heart:

Or the vice method:

Or the safest method of all, the $50 tool:

Note, all methods void the warranty (but its already expired on 4770s anyway).

For the record, I've successfully done the razor method on a 3770k before, and I have the tool for LGA1151 that I used for my 7700k.

Ok, I think that as for now I would not do the delidding thing as I'm still in debt to my friend, still paying him both the CPU and Mobo, and got some kind of 'warranty' (even if it's a bit informal).
And also, to be pretty honest, I'm definitely faint of heart for this kind of stuff lol

I managed to cool it a bit by adding an exhaust side fan, but it was just a 3°c difference (from 45° to 42° on idle)
I don't know if this fan setup is good enough, but at least it helped a bit (rear is intake, side is exhaust and as usual on Intel stock coolers, CPU is intake):
My case doesn't fits any more fans, and it doesn't has bottom, front or top fan support.

Also, is Prime95 safe to use? What would happen if temperatures get beyond 90°? (although I haven't seen it happen)
I know that after a certain mark, the CPU would start to throttle to prevent damage, but what is the threshold for throttle to happen on the 4770?

The TjMax on a 4770 is 100C, at which point the chip throttles in order to protect itself and maintain system stability, so the computer would slow to a crawl but shouldn't crash or anything.

Also the stock Intel coolers are a joke, they are only just barely adequate to let the chip occasionally reach its maximum turbo mode. Even a $30 cooler master hyper 212 variant would probably knock several degrees off your load temps, step up a bit to one of the larger noctua tower coolers and you probably won't break much past 80C even on prime (thought getting below that requires delidding no matter what cooler you have).

Ok, will research more about CPU coolers, and see what can I get.
Thanks for your help as always Krom!