With my stock cooler and the thermal paste that was on it I had to undervolt my cpu to 1.24v after vdrop under load to keep my temps at 60C or less. When I removed the stock heatsink I noticed only a small amount of the thermal paste had stuck to the cpu and wondered if that meant like 30% or less of the die was actually making contact with the cooler. When I switched to a zalman 9700 and applied AS5 my temps dropped SIGNIFICANTLY. At 1.32 volts after vdrop my temp was 80C with the stock stuff and I can up it to 1.38 after vdrop with a way higher overclock and still keep the temps just under 60C for load. Is there any way I could have possibly messed up applying the stock cooler? All the instructions indicated was to push the 4 pins down until they clicked which I did. I'm really happy my temps dropped this significantly, but I'm sure that something must have been wrong with the stock cooler to cause this. Also, when I was removing the stock cooler not all 4 of the pins removed as stated in the directions. I had to simply remove my motherboard, get pliers and tear the bottom of the pin apart to get it out.
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Weird temperature findings, please read (e6600)
- Thread starter Jared701
- Start date
theres been many posts around here about those pin style retention clips that several mfg's are using are garbage. however hard you tried and however much time and care you took to install it, its most likely it wasnt installed 'correctly'. but if you have a zalman anyway what do you care about the stock HSF? 
also those temps on the zalman seem slightly high. what voltage is your CPU set at in bios (dont factor in vdroop, it varies so much you cant compare it)
also those temps on the zalman seem slightly high. what voltage is your CPU set at in bios (dont factor in vdroop, it varies so much you cant compare it)