Are my i7 10700k temps ok (non OC)

Corban227

Gawd
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Dec 2, 2009
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I am unfamiliar with normal full load temps for the 10700k i7 and am wondering if I should upgrade to an all in one water cooler to be safe.

I am currently using a Coolermaster hyper 212 on the i7 with no overclock.

When I am processing videos on handbrake, the core will reach around 85c with the fan at full throttle. I noticed it because the alarm started going off. I am wondering if I should adjust the temp the alarm turns on at, or if I need to invest in a better cooler for the processor. This is my first i7 and my first upgrade in a substantial amount of time so I am unfamiliar with the landscape. Thanks for the advice.
 
One thing that's changed lately is the power limit setting on Intel chips and it becoming important. I bet your board is feeding your i7-10700k a lot more than the 125W in the official spec from Intel. Most non-ASUS boards disable power limits by default and just let the chip have as much as it can use or the board can supply, depending on the VRM design. A decent board will go well over 200W. You can even get fairly cheap B460 boards that will do 255W, like the MSI MAG Mortar and Tomahawk.

I haven't played around with an i7-10700k. The closest I've gotten is an i7-10700. Those are officially 65W CPUs, but with the power limits off it'll suck down 170W or a bit less and end up with all cores at 4.6GHz unless the test is AVX heavy. Run an AVX stress test and the power draw goes even higher. In my case it ended up at 100C and thermal throttled. The 10xxx chips don't throttle until they hit 100C. I only tested increments of 15W up to 185W, which landed me at 85C. I'm not sure how much it would take to max out an i7-10700k without overclocking it. These chips also have a short term power limit. For the 10700 the official spec is 224W. 65W TDP but it can burst at 224W for 28s. Some are a bit higher, but I don't recall if that includes the 10700k or only applies to i9s. You can change the short term limit too, but it doesn't make as much difference since it's only enabled for less than a minute or until the CPU gets too hot.

At any rate, you might want to set your long term power limit to something your cooling can handle. 85C is fine, but I'd fiddle with the power limit until I figured out about how many watts that is and set it to that. Or if you'd rather keep the machine quiet you can lower it.
 
I was considering upgrading the cooler to handle the power. for the most part, I am very busy with work right now and am not left with a lot of time to experiment with my settings like I used to be able to. I was looking at an arctic liquid freezer II 280 as a potential upgrade to the hyper 212. I will also look into the dark rock 360 AIO.

that's interesting about the board disabling power limits. I didn't consider that as a possibility
 
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