Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 temps and a few other things

My old MSI P965 Neo basically gave up the ghost on me during Christmas. It had clocked about 60,000 working hours under its belt, and since day one, running an E4300 on it felt like a constant struggle to squeeze performance out of a budget setup when you're broke 😁

Running around here and there...
Picked one up today and got it assembled
ASUS P35
with an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0
First thing hitting me is the temperature, though I managed to fix part of it...
I didn't dive deep into the BIOS settings, but I noticed the multiplier or whatever was set to 6x (I didn't mess with anything, just skimmed through)
Tried putting it under a bit of a load, and after half an hour, the max temp hit
78 degrees on one core, slightly less on the other
CPU temp was at 73 degrees..

Still, feels a little high to me...
The cooler is just that standard Intel 775 stock unit...

So I started poking around the BIOS. Everything looked a bit sketchy (you never really know how much someone messed with used gear), so I hit "load optimized defaults." Suddenly the multiplier jumps to 9x, and instead of 2000MHz, I'm sitting at 3000MHz..

Ran another stress test and now the temps are hovering at 68 on the cores, and even lower on the CPU itself.. I'll give the heatsink a good cleaning tomorrow (it's pretty dusty, haven't had the time yet)...

Anyway, what are the absolute maximum temperatures I should be allowing for this processor? =)

Second little headache...
I'm running DDR2 memory
1x 1GB, 667MHz
1x 1GB, 800MHz
1x 2GB, 800MHz (no label on this one, just going by memory—some no-name Chinese stick a buddy gave me)

In Windows 7 SP1, 64-bit, it shows 4GB total, but only 3GB available...
-Any idea why? 😁
There's no integrated graphics, (I'm using my old GT 220, 1GB)

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Intel+Core+2+Duo+E8400+max+temperature

😛

That seems a little high to me. I guess if you haven't cleaned out the cooler or swapped the thermal paste lately, then yeah, it makes sense that it’s running hotter.

I finally cooled down the processor, and man, it’s sitting about 20 degrees lower now. It won't even touch 63 degrees on the cores. I gave the heatsink a good cleaning and slapped on some fresh paste... though the paste was actually still new, I just hadn't cleaned out the dust from the heatsink itself)

As for my RAM, I'm still scratching my head over why it isn't showing up right. Honestly, I have this nagging feeling the GPU is just swallowing it all because of some driver issues—and don't even get me started on Windows Update. It's being an absolute nightmare lately... just devouring every bit of memory I have until nothing else will run, haha)

Regarding the RAM, maybe one of those 1GB modules is acting up. I guess you could try booting with different combinations of what you have on hand to see if that helps.

Of course your temps are spiking if you're overclocking on a stock cooler. Grab an aftermarket one like an LC95 for maybe $12 and you'll see those numbers drop immediately.

I didn't actually overclock anything; I just reset everything back to the factory defaults... the Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0

Ryan James60 said:I didn't even overclock anything; I just reset everything back to factory defaults... my Core 2 Duo is stock at 3.0GHz

You should probably grab a better cooler though, especially since they're so inexpensive right now.

So, for now, this is just how it stands... I’m sitting at about 35-40 degrees at idle, and it hits 62 degrees once I push it to the limit...
I really need to figure out why the system is still reporting 4GB total with only 3GB usable; Resource Monitor is showing that 1GB is being swallowed up by "hardware reserved"...

I’ve already gone through and installed every single driver... so it doesn't look like the issue is coming from the GPU (GT220 1GB)

So, here’s the deal with my RAM...
1x1GB stick works fine (667MHz)
1x1GB stick works fine (800MHz)
2x1GB setup works great—using a mix of those two above, and the system correctly sees 2GB total.
But this 1x2GB stick? Total junk. It’s some no-name 800MHz module I grabbed from an overseas site, and it’s failing hard. The system says 2GB is there, but it's only actually using 1GB; the other half is just sitting there as "hardware reserved."
When I plug everything in together, the OS claims I have 4GB, but I can only actually use 3GB because 1GB is stuck in reserve.

The motherboard is an ASUS P35.
Is it possible the sticks are just defective? Or maybe I got scammed with some fake capacity? 🙂

Ran a memory check and it didn't flag any errors.
Next step is to test them on a different board to see how they behave. I might just borrow a standard 1x2GB stick from a buddy to see if the issue follows the stick or stays with my board.