Monday, August 9, 2010
Experimentation Weekend: Pushing the Thermal Limits of the Intel Core i7 920 CPU
Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Talk" @ 08:00 AM
I spent a few hours this past weekend experimenting with two things: a new EVGA GTX460 1GB video card, and fans on my media production machine. This post is about the fans and the CPU.
When I built this machine last fall, I listened to the advice of the salespeople at my favourite local computer store (Memory Express). They're all very knowledgeable people, but when it comes to thermals, I've noticed one thing: most people tend to be very conservative. The Intel Core i7 920 CPU, for instance, can tolerate temperatures of nearly 100 degrees Celsius. You wouldn't want to push it to that level and leave it there of course, but the point is, Intel built it to take that heat without damage.
In fact, when it starts to get too hot, the Core i7 920 will actually reduce the core multiplier and down-clock the CPU. That's some very smart engineering - yet if you do an online search, you'll find people in forums saying that if you get over 60 Celsius on this CPU, you'll be in trouble. So people put fast, loud fans in their systems, subjecting themselves to a noisy computer - and I don't think they need to. Read more...