![intel burn test over 90 degrees stock intel burn test over 90 degrees stock](https://www.overclock.net/d3/avatars/h/297/297215.jpg)
I know that's stating the obvious, but we've had bad experiences with these "performance-enhancing" tweaks in the past when they've goosed many-core chips like the Core i7-6950X, and they're sometimes on by default in firmware from Gigabyte and Asus, at least. Not only do these settings ruin any sense of what "stock" performance is from a given processor, they place the same demands on heatsinks as an equivalent overclock would. Other sites may not, and that's not ideal. We vigorously search out and disable these kinds of settings for every CPU review we do, since they're the same as overclocking. This "enhancement" (happily left off by default, as "Auto" means in the Z370 Aorus Gaming 7's firmware) runs all six cores of our i7-8700K at the single-core Turbo Boost speed, or 4.7 GHz. Next up, I tried to run the chip with Gigabyte's "multi-core enhancement" turned on. In any case, the stock-clocked i7-8700K proved perfectly happy under our Hyper 212 Evo stand-in. That's entry-level high-end desktop territory, so slightly higher temps than we're used to should be par for the course. Those numbers are certainly warm for a stock-clocked LGA 1151 CPU, but it's worth remembering that we're now asking the cooler to wrangle six cores and 12 threads instead of four cores and eight threads.
#Intel burn test over 90 degrees stock pro
With the MasterAir Pro 4 on top, those clocks and voltages resulted in a CPU package temperature of 78° C, according to HWiNFO64. Gigabyte's Easy Tune utility reported that the chip was running at 4.3 GHz-its normal all-core Turbo speed-at 1.1V under this synthetic load. Prime95 hammers a chip's AVX units in a way that's meant to produce the most heat possible, well beyond what any real-world workload might generate. With that in mind, I ran the Prime95 Small FFTs torture test at stock speeds to establish a baseline for the chip's thermal behavior. We obviously want to stay as far below that threshold as possible, but it establishes an upper limit for what a "bad" temperature might be for the chip.
![intel burn test over 90 degrees stock intel burn test over 90 degrees stock](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/n0U7fPKRlVs/maxresdefault.jpg)
Hit that temperature, and the i7-8700K will begin to throttle. Intel's Tjunction specification for this chip remains the same 100° C it's been for Skylake and Kaby Lake K-series CPUs.
![intel burn test over 90 degrees stock intel burn test over 90 degrees stock](https://windows-cdn.softpedia.com/screenshots/thumbs/IntelBurnTest-thumb.png)
It was simple enough to see whether the Core i7-8700K fell on the right or wrong side of the MasterAir Pro 4's cooling power, so I popped off the 280-mm Corsair H115i that usually cools our test chips and set up the MasterAir Pro 4 in its place.įirst off, it's worth defining what "hot" means in the context of the i7-8700K.
![intel burn test over 90 degrees stock intel burn test over 90 degrees stock](https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/1995/bench/Stock.png)
I don't have a Hyper 212 Evo here, but I do have Cooler Master's MasterAir Pro 4, a 120-mm tower that's basically the same heatsink as a Hyper 212 Evo with a newer fan design. Still, the TR water-cooler meeting this morning produced an interesting line in the sand for whether a chip is difficult to cool: can it be held in check by Cooler Master's evergreen Hyper 212 Evo? That $30 tower remains a fine bang-for-the-buck contender among CPU heatsinks, so it's a natural baseline for establishing whether a chip is tough to keep frosty. Although I ran into a thermal limit while trying to boost voltages enough to get our chip stable under a Prime95 AVX workload, running all of the chip's AVX units at 4.8 GHz was no small feat, and we expect high temperatures as a matter of course from unmodified Intel CPUs when they're overclocked. I was a bit confused reading these statements, because the i7-8700K didn't seem to be an exceptionally hot-running chip in my testing compared to other modern Intel CPUs. Many reviewers have noted that the chip "runs hot," so much so that the idea even made for sub-headline news at one outlet. Intel's Core i7-8700K has proved to be an exceptionally well-rounded CPU in our testing so far, but one potential negative has come up again and again in the other reviews I've been reading. I deeply regret the error and have corrected the article accordingly. The board in fact ships with the feature disabled.
#Intel burn test over 90 degrees stock update
Update 10:45 PM: This article originally stated that the Gigabyte Z370 Aorus Gaming 7 motherboard ships with "multi-core enhancement" enabled.