My Athlon X4 860K is as hot as hades.

[D2Disciple]

I built a very basic desktop rig for general purpose use (and for fun) some time back. I purchased an Athlon X4 860K because 1. I have an irrational love for AMD CPUs, and 2. It looked like it would be fun to overclock.

I could not have been more wrong. From the very get-go, I BSOD'd and had to *underclock* the thing to 3.5Ghz. It ran stable, but I got curious tonight and ran a Prime95 stress test. Chickened out after three minutes in and the CPU was 97.8 degrees C.

So I slapped in a cheap Arctic A11 cooler with three heatpipes and a 92mm fan to replace the stock cooler. No changes, didn't even increase it to factory clocks, and it's *still* running at a steady 80 degrees C under a Prime 95 load.

Anyone got any ideas what might be going on? Or do I just have a terrible CPU? Underclocked, the thing is nearly worthless.

[PlayStation 2]

Probably got a silicon dud, or you're running it in a crappy case. Also, I would highly recommend a better cooler, even the Cooler Master Hyper T4 is better.

[Morgan MLGman]

Athlon II X4 860K is not an irrational choice, it's the best all-around CPU within its price range beating the Pentium G3258

/ What voltage does CPU-Z report under load?

[The_Stig]

Prime95. There's your problem. Try AIDA 64 or Intel Extreme Tuning Utility.

[Inception9269]

I built a very basic desktop rig for general purpose use (and for fun) some time back. I purchased an Athlon X4 860K because 1. I have an irrational love for AMD CPUs, and 2. It looked like it would be fun to overclock.

I could not have been more wrong. From the very get-go, I BSOD'd and had to *underclock* the thing to 3.5Ghz. It ran stable, but I got curious tonight and ran a Prime95 stress test. Chickened out after three minutes in and the CPU was 97.8 degrees C.

So I slapped in a cheap Arctic A11 cooler with three heatpipes and a 92mm fan to replace the stock cooler. No changes, didn't even increase it to factory clocks, and it's *still* running at a steady 80 degrees C under a Prime 95 load.

Anyone got any ideas what might be going on? Or do I just have a terrible CPU? Underclocked, the thing is nearly worthless.

 

Any chance of getting an RMA or something? sounds like a bad chip

[PCgamer324]

Prime95. There's your problem. Try AIDA 64 or Intel Extreme Tuning Utility.

yeah 've heard that Prime95 is a bit unreliable as of late

[Interfectorem]

I know this seems too simple, but I would first and make sure you have a proper mount on your CPU. 98C is way beyond AMD spec and I would imagine it would have shut down due to thermal issues long before reaching 98C. What motherboard do you happen to run the 860K with? Is your thermal paste applied correctly? Is your CPU fan spinning and at an adequate speed? If none of the above is the issue, then I'm afraid you may have a dud chip and you should contact AMD or the re-seller for a replacement / RMA.

[D2Disciple]

1. Sucky case is a very real possibility. Actually, I'm planning on purchasing an NZXT Source 220 soon to mitigate that... Its just an old fashioned micro ATX case. Originally housed a Pentium D / Geforce 8600 GT build from years ago.

2. VCore seems really high for below factory clocks... 1.368 is what I'm reading now.

3. All temp readings were done by CPUID's HWMonitor while using Prime95. I have no idea if they're accurate... I was thinking that the CPU would have throttled or shut off before reaching nearly 100 degrees.

The CPU was purchased some time ago... It might be past it's warranty. I didn't really fix it early on because I just used the machine for basic everyday computing. I should dig up the documentation from the bowels of my closet to find out...

Thanks for the help. I was thinking this wasn't right.

[D2Disciple]

Found my problem. Apparently, third party hardware monitors don't report AMD APU temps properly, making them look extremely high, sometimes up to 110 under load.

Apparently, this is because of some math calculation the processor does to itself to report thermal margin, the number of degrees C that the chip can undergo before reaching its theoretical max. This is only read appropriately by the AMD Overdrive utility.

Fortunately, with the new cooler, I have plenty of headroom. Everything seems stable with an overclock to 4.2 GHz on all cores. Now I just need to adjust fan speed down a bit so they're not running at high all the time.

[Nena Trinity]

My 860K is around 40-45c on a FX-8370 stock cooler at stock speed... (if ya OC I advice a strong motherboard and a AIO or beefy air cooler such as 212 Evo)