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i7-2600k, stock cooler - should I bother overclocking?

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Techboy10

Member
Joined
Dec 7, 2010
Location
Massachusetts
or should I just keep it at stock speeds until I can pick up an aftermarket cooler (for a 24/7 overclock)? :shrug:

With the stock cooler it idles around 28-30C and after an an hour of playing Crysis the highest it reached was 50C on one core, the rest were 48-49C. I haven't done an official test like Prime95/IntelBurnTest yet so I'm not sure what it would reach there.

So the question stands, try overclocking now (nothing serious, probably only try to get 3.8-4 GHz) or wait until I get an aftermarket cooler and go for 4-4.5 GHz?
 
The stock cooler on the 2600k is pretty good. You should get to 4.4ghz easy.

If all you want is 4ghz, that is completely fine on the stock cooler.
 
It will thermal throttle when you get to 90c anyway, so anything is safe.

But yeah if you are wanting to play it extra safe 80c is a good number.
 
And remember, IBT will have your CPU to AT LEAST 10C more than anything else you throw at it.
 
yeah i think ibt isn't really necessary just use prime95 smallFFT. If it's stable for 2 hours with that it'll be stable for anything else you could possibly throw at it with normal usage.
 
Sounds good, thanks everyone :)

Gonna start when I get home from work in a little bit, should be a fun time haha.
 
lol yeah thats all you really have to do with sandy bridge, it's pretty simple.

The stock cooler for the 2600k looks exactly like a Arctic freezer pro 7, it's pretty decent with a solid copper base, tower style with 3 heat pipes with a 92mm fan. The 2500k comes with the typical crappy intel cooler, low profile copper center but doesn't cool well at all.
 
lol yeah thats all you really have to do with sandy bridge, it's pretty simple.

The stock cooler for the 2600k looks exactly like a Arctic freezer pro 7, it's pretty decent with a solid copper base, tower style with 3 heat pipes with a 92mm fan. The 2500k comes with the typical crappy intel cooler, low profile copper center but doesn't cool well at all.

I heard that the retail 2600k's were coming with the crappy one and that only ES/review samples came with the nice cooler :shrug:
 
I heard that the retail 2600k's were coming with the crappy one and that only ES/review samples came with the nice cooler :shrug:

Oh, well in that case we need the OP to confirm. But the fact that he's only reaching 50c loaded right now makes me think it's the good one. But even on that one I believe he'll be able to make it to 4ghz and actually undervolt the CPU to keep the temps down.



OP- Did your 2600k come with the little crappy round low profile cooler or did it come with a heat piped small tower cooler?
 
2600K comes with a crappy little cooler and not gulftown's huge intel cooler. For ****s and giggles newegg sells that intel gulftown cooler for 50 bucks
 
Oh, OK.

LOL, yeah thats hilarious when the Arctic Freezer 7 is like $30 and it's the exact same thing.
 
Oh, well in that case we need the OP to confirm. But the fact that he's only reaching 50c loaded right now makes me think it's the good one. But even on that one I believe he'll be able to make it to 4ghz and actually undervolt the CPU to keep the temps down.

OP- Did your 2600k come with the little crappy round low profile cooler or did it come with a heat piped small tower cooler?

It comes with the crappy round low profile cooler, which is unfortunate. I'm actually reaching around 55C on load I think (then again I still haven't done a proper Prime95 test, thats just from playing Crysis for a few hours haha).

I tried overclocking to 4GHz (I think I did it right, I just set the Turbo multiplier to 40) but when I ran Intel Burn Test it heated up to 82-84C so I just stopped it. I know that Intel Burn Test gets its hotter than it ever will be doing normal tasks (someone said by about 10C), but that was still too hot for me to feel comfortable. I kept the voltage on its default setting (which was most likely a mistake) and looking at CPU-Z (if I remember correctly) it looked like it was all over the place. What's a safe voltage to set it at? 1.25v?

Thanks, right now I just have it running @ stock settings again.
 
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Add ~10C for Prime95 Small FFT. You still have some headroom though. Keep it in the mid 80's while stress testing P95 and you will load into the mid 70s with anything else. 4Ghz will be fine on that cooler, and IBT isnt close to load temps (gets hotter than P95!!!).
 
Run whatever voltage is the minimum needed to get P95 stable. You could start with 1.25, but I bet you'll be able to go lower than that at only 4ghz. Auto voltage will indeed ramp it up way past what it needs to be for sure.
 
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