7 Years Ago Today Intel Launched the Core i7-2600K

Maybe you guys can offer advice - I have a 2600k that’s been lately getting over 90c on all cores in coretemp on stock cooler with no OC, built in 2011.

Has been giving me BSOD and bios screen tells me CPU over temperature error.

Assume it’s heat related. Have considered replacing stock HS, but what would have changed except maybe just age and thermal paste had the course?
 
Maybe you guys can offer advice - I have a 2600k that’s been lately getting over 90c on all cores in coretemp on stock cooler with no OC, built in 2011.

Has been giving me BSOD and bios screen tells me CPU over temperature error.

Assume it’s heat related. Have considered replacing stock HS, but what would have changed except maybe just age and thermal paste had the course?

well the stock cooler is pretty marginal to start with, have you opened the case up and seen if the fan is actually running? how much dust and whatever has built up inside.. thermal paste will eventually dry out over time and preform worse than it did when it was first applied.

I would think it would be well worth your time to open the case dust it out check the fans... and puller the cpu cooler clean (cooler / heatplate) and cpu and then reapply fresh thremal paste and reseat cooler...

replacing the stock cooler is also a perfectly reasonable idea...many many better options depending on budget / case size and room inside case / memory clearance..etc..
 
Thermal paste probably just needs to be replaced if your airflow isn't muted by dead fans
 
Barely a day goes by that I don't either praise or brag about mine. Using OC genie and combined w/ a good case and decent PSU it's happily chugged along at 4.2ghz and taskmanager shows it boosting to 5.17 since the day I got it 7 years ago!

Easily the build and chip that I've loved the most in my life so far.

All air cooled and hits games like a sledgehammer!

2600k OC'd to 4.2GHZ
Hyper 212 Evo CPU Cooler
MSI Z68 GD65 G3
G. Skill Trident 32GB 2133MHZ
Asus Strix 1080ti OC(2012mhz/5858mhz/+115% power)
Corsair 80+platinum 1000w (leftover from when I was using this as an SLI rig)
CoolerMaster HAF X(extra top fan added and I changed both fan positions to force exhaust thru the top and back)
Toshiba OCZ 960GB(Games)
2 500GB 850pro's Raid0(Games)
Sandisk 120GB(OS-Win 10 64bit)
Asus 27" 1440p 144hz G-Sync 3d , Optoma UHD60 4k Projector
 
Last edited:
Chiming in on the 2600K love. I wish I had some reason to upgrade. But that with 16GB RAM just does not give me any sense that it's too slow for my daily usage.

Which is the clearest hint I'm old. :(
 
well the stock cooler is pretty marginal to start with, have you opened the case up and seen if the fan is actually running? how much dust and whatever has built up inside.. thermal paste will eventually dry out over time and preform worse than it did when it was first applied.

I would think it would be well worth your time to open the case dust it out check the fans... and puller the cpu cooler clean (cooler / heatplate) and cpu and then reapply fresh thremal paste and reseat cooler...

replacing the stock cooler is also a perfectly reasonable idea...many many better options depending on budget / case size and room inside case / memory clearance..etc..
Thanks - should have mentioned I have opened it up and made sure cpu fan is running as well as blew it all out with compressed air. Wasn’t too dusty. I do that relatively often.

Front two case fans are ok, rear fan cycles, probably bad bearing. Top fan is worse. Often sticks. Not the best airflow.

But not sure why it would suddenly decide enough is enough ...
 
Which adapter is that? have my 2500k running at 4.3 and would like to use a m2 stick. To give it some more oomph.

This is the trick, you need an m.2 drive that supports legacy mode - Of wich there aren't many. From memory I'm running a Hyper X Predator, there is also a Samsung that's compatible (850 Evo?), but their getting rare now.
 
T-shirts are important. You can't write important things on a dress shirt. Speaking of t-shirts, I was at the doctors office three days ago and a guy close to my age (mid-forties maybe) walked in wearing a Vault Tec t-shirt. I looked at him and said, "I like your shirt." He snickered a bit and said, "Ask me about my settlements!"

I asked, "Do they have bathrooms?" He said, "No! Yours have bathrooms?" And then his wife came up behind him and said, "Are you telling me there's another idiot in this town playing that stupid game?"
Greatness.
 
The only reason I upgrade is because I want to play with a new toy, not because I genuinely need it.

My overclocked 3930k in my sig is the equivalent of a stock 7800x, and actually pulls in a higher CB multi threaded score than a stock 5960x.

x58 and LGA2011v1 were so much fun to overclock.
 
Thanks - should have mentioned I have opened it up and made sure cpu fan is running as well as blew it all out with compressed air. Wasn’t too dusty. I do that relatively often.

Front two case fans are ok, rear fan cycles, probably bad bearing. Top fan is worse. Often sticks. Not the best airflow.

But not sure why it would suddenly decide enough is enough ...


well... fans are pretty cheap I'd probably replace the rear exhaust fan at least as it helps blow hot air coming up of the GPU outta the case as well as exhausting hot air coming off cpu.. the rear fan is probably more important than the front intake fans I think....

If it was me I'd take the cooler off / clean and reapply thermal paste..

and I might replace the cmos battery if it is pretty old and clear the cmos set defaults and then set anything needed again just to be sure somehow something didn't get messed up in the bios...
 
Still running my 2500k @ 4.2 since initial release. With a zotac 1060mini, in PUBG i get a usually smooth 65fps at 1440p (reduced settings, still looks great).

Its incredible how much money this platform has saved me. I have not bought any hardware besides gpu and ssd since 2011.

Thank you Intel for not making worthwile improvements for so long.
Will definitely be going Amd with Ryzen refresh.
 
Still rocking my 2500k!
Same, can bring mine up to 4.6 on water and love it, stupid water pump broke on me so I had to go air for now and drop to 4.0 but the thing still handles it's own in games just fine.
 
Got my 2600K @ 4.6 Ghz. I'd been predicting for a couple years that I'd upgrade around this year, though with this Intel issue happening, I won't be upgrading until there's a new architecture out that doesn't have the same flaw. I'm hoping that will be Ice Like, and that it will have at least 8 cores / 8 threads.


People with less than 4.4 Ghz on their 2500k or 2600k: Why? Even the worst samples can handle 4.4 Ghz.

Maybe you guys can offer advice - I have a 2600k that’s been lately getting over 90c on all cores in coretemp on stock cooler with no OC, built in 2011.

Has been giving me BSOD and bios screen tells me CPU over temperature error.

Assume it’s heat related. Have considered replacing stock HS, but what would have changed except maybe just age and thermal paste had the course?

Either the CPU heatsink / fan isn't seated properly, the fan's broken, or the thermal paste's gone bad. Either way, you have to remove the fan and clean off the old paste and apply new paste to re-seat the fan, or install a new one.
 
"even worst samples can handle 4.4ghz"

My 2500k was only happy at 4.2 with 1.28vcore. Any higher required more voltage and i wanted to stay below 1.3v.
Maybe mine was a bad chip but for 7 years has served me well.
 
I am still using one, I give this amazing CPU some credit for PC gaming success. I think that custom builders able to use these CPUs for so long put a new level of value in PC gaming. So many people have been put into scenarios where they just have free spending cash because for 7 years they didn't need to upgrade the CPU. For me personally it resulted in increasing my GPU purchases. I never bough $600 GPUs before but after several years of using Sandy Bridge I was like well normally I would have spent 500 upgrading CPU, RAM and motherboard but since I saved all that I can spend extra on a GPU.
 
"even worst samples can handle 4.4ghz"

My 2500k was only happy at 4.2 with 1.28vcore. Any higher required more voltage and i wanted to stay below 1.3v.
Maybe mine was a bad chip but for 7 years has served me well.

You just weren't willing to give it enough voltage. Sandy Bridge can safely handle 1.4v without any issue.
 
1.4v here since new no issues at 4.8.
I've always been worried about degradation since SB is the first generation we really heard people talking about it happening to them in any kind of volume. My 3970X gets a bit toast at 1.4 though
 
I've always been worried about degradation since SB is the first generation we really heard people talking about it happening to them in any kind of volume. My 3970X gets a bit toast at 1.4 though

Since day one this 2700k ran at 1.4v/4.8 no prolem. Running fine to this day under a H100 with great temps.
 
2600K @ 4.7 GHz running at 1.35v (since November 2011), cooled by Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme
 
Last edited:
1.4 is on a border of being too toasty depending on chip, but around 1.35 should be safe for any Sandy Bridge as long as temps stay below 80c in stress tests.
 
I moved from a 2600k to a 3770k about 5 years ago or thereabouts, and there wasn't much improvement, until the latest round of cpus I haven't felt like there was enough of a boost to be worth considering, even now when looking at the 8700k Im thinking "I'd kind of like an m2 socket on my motherboard" rather than "wow, look at that performance!".
As it stands, at this point I'll probably wait until Intel releases something that isn't vulnerable to Meltdown (or AMD releases a gaming cpu that performs stronger than intels) before changing, and I figure that's going to be 18-24 months
 
7 years and I still haven't even upgraded to that point.

Sad...Sad fucking times man.
 
Finally replaced my 2600k system with a Ryzen 1700x because of the increased amount of h.265 encoding I'm doing, but the 2600k lives on in the PLEX server I've got running some background encoding to boot. Slowed her down from the 4.3Ghz overclock she ran for 6 years, though, let her relax for awhile.
 
Nice.
I am very happy that I purchased the 3770k, delidded it, water cooled it and overclocked it. Strong as a beast.
I made a good decision at the time when I purchased it. And a good decision on the motherboard I bought and ram and gfx card and and and and and................................ Lol. :D

n1mgYRt.jpg
 
For budget builds I do for people are off lease Dell i7 2600 systems, every now and again MC has them for under $200, toss in a SSD and bang, really nice fast system for $400.
 
I still have my 2600k in my gaming rig, I've had it since the January launch.
 
Skipped the 2500k and a few more generations.

Went from a i7 860 @ 3.5 Ghz to a i7 7700k @ 5 Ghz. Significant improvement.

Moved the i7 860 to the kids system to replace an i3 that was running at 3.7 Ghz. :D
First gen core is slow compared to the 2nd generation, like it was a HUGE upgrade.

The only thing making a 6700k better than 2700k is 100-200 mhz upgrade and ddr4 for the most part.

1->2nd gen was memory improvements, huge ipc, huge clock speed (1ghz), huge subsystem
 
My son just inherited my 2600k system with the 980 Ti chaser for xmas. Newegg still sells the 2600k, as I was buying an 8700k three weeks ago to build out, and saw they were asking $400 and change for one. Now...I really should build out that 8700......
 
My son just inherited my 2600k system with the 980 Ti chaser for xmas. Newegg still sells the 2600k, as I was buying an 8700k three weeks ago to build out, and saw they were asking $400 and change for one. Now...I really should build out that 8700......
Keep in mind that is from a 3rd party place so they probably got the price jacked up $$$.
 
Congrats to you early Sandy Bridge owners, you chose well at the time. Must be some of the best hardware choices in the history.

Indeed! It has been a while since I built a single computer. I actually had to stop and think for a second how it all went again when I built my new Ryzen rig last tuesday. :D
 
Micro Center is the only reason I'm not still running mine. It's hard not to upgrade when you can get a new mobo and cpu for less than you can sell your old stuff for when the right sale hits.
 
Micro Center is the only reason I'm not still running mine. It's hard not to upgrade when you can get a new mobo and cpu for less than you can sell your old stuff for when the right sale hits.
Same here. Best CPU/Mobo combo deals. They have THE best CPU prices, and still take $30 off on the combos.
 
My 2600k still working daily at 4.3 overclocked.
The 2600k is my main Windows rig. I'm going to replace the entire system at some point, but so far, haven't found a reason yet. (Yes, I know I will get better some better performance, more options from the mobo, etc...)
 
2500k @ 4.3

I wouldn't mind an upgrade to 3770k @ 4.3... but damn if those things haven't held their value too well. Because everyone like me is still looking at them because it's so much more effective than going out and getting a whole new 7***k or 8***k system.

I mean, unless you REALLLY gotta have that native M.2 port I guess.

I was running my [email protected] on air until [email protected] on water for 5 years. Android rooting, unlocking and custom roms had me forget about overclocking and upgrading. Then, I thought it's time for an upgrade when Ryzen came out, but I ended up with 8700K
 
Back
Top