Hi everybody,

I have a newly-purchased Acer desktop with a Q6600 (2.4GHz) with B3 steppings. I installed and fired up Everest and it gives the following info on my core temps:

Core 1: 56C
Core 2: 57C
Core 3: 55C
Core 4: 49C

All of this is during normal use - ie. web surfing and such, not into heavy gaming.

Truthfully I don't know much about what's acceptable / unacceptable regarding CPU temps, but this seems a bit high to me. Could somebody please advise? And if they are excessive, what can I do about it?

Thanks in advance!

Those temps appear to be way too high under normal use. My idle temp on speedfan is like 26C at 75F room temp.

http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

mine is being watercooled and Nvidia monitor says it is 40 celcius. I have to see what everest says.

Several retailers are shipping the B3 when you order Q6600 and I don't think they will allow customers to request the G0 shipping. I don't want to risk it then so I wonder if it makes sense to buy E6750 or E6850.

What do you guys think?

I could have used the Quad Core (doing video stuff) but I don't want to worry about heat and needing to buy an expensive heatsink to cool a B3 chip.

The q6600 has no heat problems. You are misinformed if you think the chip runs hot. My q6600 idles at 25c at 75f room tempature. I have been running the q6600 since March. It is the coolest running chip I have ever owned and by far.

How am I misinformed? Many people are talking about the heat and the problems overclocking (although, that is not what I wanted it for). It's 105 watts v.s. 65 watts for the G0 stepping E6x50 chips. Unless, you can get the G0 stepping Q6600, it runs hot (and it's only a reduction of 10 watts so you still need good air cooling and thus, a good heatsink). If that is not true, then a lot of people are saying false things.

If that Acer is using the stock heatsink I would change it out for a heatsink that has heatpipes. I just got my Q6600 with the B3 stepping yesterday. I am using a Artic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro heatsink with mine and Artic Silver 5 thermal paste. My core with the lowest temp is 38 at idle using Coretemp to monitor the temps. My highest temp core is 44 at idle and the temps should drop a little more after the AS5 breaks in. I got my Freezer 7 Pro at Directron for 20 bucks with free shipping. You dont have to remove the motherboard to replace the heatsink and it will probably take you about ten minutes to swap it out if you have any experience with building your own computer. The heatsink even comes with MX1 thermal paste pre applied! I always use AS5 thermal paste but the MX1 paste is supposed to be pretty good also. Finally I apply my thermal paste to the whole top of the cpu. I find the instructions at the Artic Silver website (put a line of paste down the middle of the cpu) doesn't give enough enough coverage to these multicore cpus.

Your are terribly misinformed. The people who have problems with heat are the ones jacking the unit's voltage around, twisting the FSB to 500 mhz. and generally pushing their components beyond their means. You get the posts, "Is my temp too high at 500 mhz fsb?" "Hi, I increased the vcore to 1.75v and my system is not stable?" "Is the stock heatsink good enough if I plan to run my q6600 beyond 3.3?" "Is burning silicone something I should recognize immediately...I smell something at 1.8v?"

There is no problem whatsoever with heat regarding the Q6600. Your worries are for not. You are concerned with fables. Over concerned is the operative word. Not buying a Q6600 because of heat issues is really misinformed thinking.

I am very busy, if you look at the task bar at the bottom of the screenshot of my current desktop you will see the part of the maybe 2 dozen tasks I was doing when this was taken. In adition, I have a slingbox running and watching Dish network. Notice my temps. Temps are of absolutely NO concern with my Q6600. Never have been. I could not be more pleased with my system. Heat is a non issue.

http://img63.imageshack.us/img63/7 [...] 227br8.jpg

Running since March '07, idles at 29C multitasking two dozen functions at once.

Q6600
ASUS P5B-Deluxe
G. Skill PC6400 4GB 4-4-4-12
EVGA 7900GTO 512 MB
WD 150 SATA RAPTOR Vista HP 32
WD 74 SATA RAPTOR Windows XP PRO
WD 250 SATA storage
ASUS DVD-ROM
ASUS DVD-RW Lightscribe
Thermaltake 700 watt quad 12v rail PSU
Thermaltake Mozart tower
Thermaltake media Lab Led Remote control
Zalman 9500 Led HSF
Audigy 2 Soundblaster
Boston Acoustics
Pinnacle Studio 9 PCI
Slingbox Pro Digital Sattelite
BenQ 22” LCD

Vista Experience rating is 5.9.

This is why I build my own computers, I'm not going to trust anyone else.

I dabble for years overclocking my builds. It is funny to say, but I have never even overclocked my q6600. I was thrilled and complete total smiles when I dropped in the q6600 replacing the e6600 C2D. This is a great machine. It will be very hard to resist Penryn. You know...Intel may end up breaking anti-trust laws trying to patent this latest round of processors. Really nice system.

Well...I have a B3 stepping Q6600 running on an MSI P6N SLI-FI motherboard with stock cooling, stock settings (no overclocking). According to the BIOS hardware monitor, my temps are around 46C idle, whereas my old E6600 (again, stock everything) was around 42C idle...

Thanks for your replies guys,

I don't know what kind of cooling system the 'puter is using, I'm guessing it's stock based on the attractive pricing. A few more questions:

Ok that's heartening, those temp's aren't THAT much lower than the temp's I'm getting so I have some hope to achieve those numbers with better cooling (hopefully).

What did you mean by "the temps should drop a little more after the AS5 breaks in"? Why would temp's improve over time?

Also, is it possible that I am getting incorrect temperature readings? I have no clue where these temperature sensors are located - I'm assuming they are sitting directly on each core - but I dunno. Is there a way to test whether the temp readings I'm getting are accurate? Or should I just accept the readings?

Thanks again for your help!

I find it ironic that the one in the thread calling others misinformed is boasting about a 26C idle temp using Speedfan without realizing the temps it reports are 15C lower than actual. Priceless!

That depends on which DTS he's reading from, core temps are always 15C higher than the IHS temp. When Badge said idles at 26C he was talking about Tcase not Tjunction. Core temp = Tjunction and IHS temp = Tcase.