20 Best Cooling For I7 8700K (2023 Updated)

The pins of the CPU were crusted on with what appeared to be dirt or thermal paste? I originally thought they were damaged or scratched. I had to clean them carefully with 100% rubbing alcohol and a Q-Tip for about minutes until everything came clean.

The seller didn’t really know about this, I had to look it up online. Be sure to inspect the bottom of the chips and clean them if necessary! However, after I cleaned it I was able to install it and it booted up fine.

Ran it through a CPU stress test and passed with flying colors. The CPU works great so far and was reasonably priced.

Bought in Mindfactory December 2016. -7 6700K -RANGER VIII -LPX 2X8 DDR4 32300MHZ -H100iv2 -SAMSUNG PM961 256GB. RMX 650W 80+GOLD – al above components arived in pacage solid like it should! ,only cpu BOX i7 6700K got WRINKLED edges and cpu was not firmed in the box cartoon, cpu was dancing inside the Box.

it was in plastic cover like it should to be but anyway. Be more carefull when and where put cpu in pacage!! Before RMA i open and instal cpu and it was working Great. was so HAPPY not RMA and send back.

6700k paired with msi 1070 both stock Battlefield 1 on ULTRA 1080p doing great 105fps-135fps while playing multiplayer. all stock. 6700k is keeping cold with h100iv2 idle 20-23C when runing prime95 about hour max temp is 55C.

while gaming never reach aboove 45-50CMAX. Got i give 4 star for bad pacage in transporting,cpu is working GREAT anyway thanks MF for quick sending. in Slovenija arived in 7days. Great Job MF.

I have a Cooler Master N200 so the board is vertical. With the case on its side so the board is flat the system is a little more stable with the Noctua. I’m not sure if it is the motherboard or the cpu that is causing the problem though articles seem to indicate the cpu.

I RMA’d the mobo once and the returned board was no different. I discussed the problem with Noctua and they were very helpful but cannot solve the problem. I decided to try the Intel liquid cooler BXTS13X to see if I can get my temps under control without further RMA’s.

Edit: The BXTS13X is in. With the BXTS15A and the cores fully loaded the core temps were high 70’s to 80C. With the liquid cooler BXTS13X, cores fully loaded, the core temps are now holding to 50C with peak of 58C.

So a win for Intel Liquid. But the Noctua would have done the job, maybe it just needs softer springs.

Great, relatively inexpensive way to upgrade an older, but still capable system. Had to update the BIOS to f20e, so that all the new parts would play nice together. The BOOT time with f9 and a graphics card newer than a GTX-2XX , was horrible; but that was the fault of the board, not the CPU.

Now it BOOT’s in 15 -20 seconds, from completely off to the Desktop. This is the second CPU I have gotten from CORN. The first one was a used FM2+ Athlon x4 860K, and now this new i7-3770k. Both are working great.

I will keep ordering parts from them. System Specs: Gigabyte GA Z77X-UD3H i7 -3770k w/ Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 16 GB GSkill RipJaws DDR3 1600 9-9-9-24 860 EVO 500GB SSD Boot Drive Crucial MX500 1 TB Game Drive EVGA GTX – 970 SC Thermal take 700 Watt Smart Series PSU Cooler Master N400 Mid Tower case.

I received this product in a timely manner, although it took a few days to ship out. The seller communicated with me in a timely and professional manner. The truth is I was a little worried to order from this third party seller based on some of the reviews I’ve seen from other people against the seller and because the product would be shipping from China.

I decided to give this seller a try and am very satisfied with the speed of the delivery and the product itself because the product worked on first install as it should. Would use this seller again in the future if the need arises.

I feel the need to mention the fact this product actually shipped from the USA instead of China, even though during the initial checkout it said it would be arriving from China. This part confused be a little bit, but I have no complaints as I received the product very fast and it works like it should straight out of the box.

Very satisfied at this present time.

Purchased this to replace the i5-3570K in my girlfriend’s PC. I’ve had it clocked at 4. 8GHz for the last 5+ years, and it’s been rock-solid, under 60C load with a Noctua NH-U14S. Perfect 4x Core CPU.

But I wanted to upgrade her PC without upgrading everything else, so I went with the best Z77 CPU – the i7-3770K. Works great! I’m a bit disappointed that it doesn’t reach 4. 8GHz like my 3570K, but it seems to be stable at 4.

6GHz while being under 70C load. Not bad. 4x extra threads for 200MHz less clock frequency? I’ll take it.

Processor runs reasonably cool, typically 20c less than my GPU on the same water-cooled loop. I installed Windows 11, and it shows 20 cores. Benchmarking with RDR2 shows a laughable difference from an I7-6700K, which is a 7 year old processor; it was 2-3fps on average.

It’s all about the GPU folks, the CPU after 7 years makes just about 1% difference. All these fools overclocking and worrying about memory latency? OK, if you’re running a database or video editing; for the other 99%, this is a great processor, but it won’t make a dimes worth of difference in FPS.

I didn’t really believe it would, but was curious how much of a difference a new CPU (that is 7 years newer), a new motherboard, and new memory would make. It makes almost no difference. I only really replaced the hardware all because I was seriously worried it was going to fail and the newer GPU will need the newer PCIE 4.

0 bus. If GPUs ever become available at MSRP, I’ll be set for awhile, but not holding my breath. It’ll probably be 2023 before that is true again.

Even in 2020 you can still do a lot with this CPU but it’s at the end of it’s rope. Right before I sold the 2600k, it was in my brother’s system and it was paired with an 860 EVO ssd and a GTX 970. The system ran really well, there were no slowdowns to speak of, and it played all his games at 1080p with decent framerates.

There are too many 8, 10, 12, and 16 cores processors being released at affordable prices. On top of that, the PS5 and Series X will use an 8-core Zen2 CPU which will ultimately make these 4c/8t processors obsolete for gaming.

Software will catch up sooner, rather than later. The 2600k had a really good run. Out of all the hardware purchases I have ever made, I would say the 2600k was my favorite. It was EPIC. I got a lot of mileage out it the 2600k, fantastic overclocking.

I probably could have got a couple more years out of the 2600k but the upgrade bug was too powerful.

Upgraded from the i5 2500k and I have to say, the performance difference is much more than I expected; I mean of course an i7 is better than an i5, but just how much? Well on my i5 I was dang near pinning it on games like Skyrim: Special Edition on ultra quality, and GTAV on high settings.

(GTX 970) Like 80 something percent to 90 something and very occasional stutters. Skyrim SE doesn’t even use 50% of the i7, usually around 40%. So if you’re still on a 2500k or lower Sandy Bridge and looking for a relatively cheap performance boost I highly recommend picking up a 2600k or even the 2700k which I’m sure is even better.

Don’t take my word for it though, Youtube search for “2600k gaming in 2018 / 2019” and see for yourself!.

This is a solid processor. I loaded it into a ASUS P6T6 Work Station Revolution mobo w/12 gigs (6X2G) of corsair DDR3, a 1000W Cooler master PSU, and 6 320G WD Blacks in RAID5. I have an outdated 200 series GPU, but not for long.

It booted up and runs great. The ASUS board hasn’t missed a beat. You gotta pay attention to the RAID controller, on the way in. Ctrl-M for Marvel & Ctrl-I for Intel. Anyways the core is running in a Coolermaster CM690 Advanced case with 6 X 140mm and 2 X 120mm fans.

I have never had a set up this nice. I was worried about the “mid tower”, but it’s more like a full tower case. I was also worried about fan noise, but you’d be amazed at how silent 6 140s run. In stock mode (3.

06G to 3. 33G) the CPU isn’t even hitting 100F with the stock cooler, from Intel! It’s sitting at 32C-36C in all 4 cores after a day of running. I am letting it all burn in for anouther 24 hours before I really run it hard.

I’m impressed. I like seeing the 8 threads of 3+GHz and you toss the 6 drives in raid at it and I have the speed of an SSD with out the limited writes/reads for the same cost. I am mouting the CPU under the stairs, between my living room and my office.

HDMI will run further than the 20′ I need to have my TV set up as a primary or secondary monitor. Then, I’ll run two or three 23″ in the office for WORK and a couple games. 🙂 a Powered USB hub w/extension and a USB DVD drive for those little occations, will keep me from having to go into the closet.

Windows Media Center, on this thing, ROCKS. It’s a whole new lease on life for Media Center. I’ll be able to feed BlueRay and 3D movies to my TV and run the glasses, with my existing TV! All in all, the combo of a i7 950, the ASUS P6T6, Coolermaster, Corsair, and WD RAID5 is going to satisfy my needs for years to come!!! I’ll GROW my raid with 2TB drives and use the 320’s as backup drives for my kids towers.

I have had a DUAL Core 2. 6G in almost the same config. This setup makes that look like childs play. Good luck to you! BUY the parts! Built it! For the money, I would have spent $5,000-$7,000 for a prebuilt system.

This thing practically built it self. Plug and play. Windows7. Instructions written on everything for idiots. My kid could have put this together and I have less than 1600. 00 into it and less than a day putting it together!.

I thought my processor had failed so I bid on this one. When I received it, I put it in and no difference. Turned out my Corsair 650W had failed after 6 years. I got my system to boot with the original processor after I replaced my power supply with a working one.

I then temporary replaced my processor with this purchased one and ran the Intel Processor Diagnostic Tool 64bit on the CPU. It passed all test so then I put my original processor back in, Since I do not need this replacement processor, I will relist it on ebay.

Testing this processor myself made me confident in my purchase and future resale of this i7 950 3. 06G.

I read a lot of people complaining about how bad the Heatsink fan is, it’s not great, but it’s adequate. One needs to seat the fan right with a good thermal paste(go out to your local electronic shop and buy some artic silver or something) is one thing.

The other issue is that motherboards tend to overvolt the vcore in auto mode. If you are buying an i7 you are probably going to overclock it sometime, so I’m sure you know how to set the vcore and test stability.

Make sure with the stock heat sink and fan that you manually set the vcore to as low as it go while still being stable(range is. 8->1. 375). Mine in particular was stable around 1. 05V with stock clock.

I would not overclock with the stock cooler. My core temps went from ~85 C to 65 C at full load(we’re talking burn test at 22 C ambient) just by changing the VCore down to it’s lowest stable setting.

I still feel it’s kind of high, but it’s well within a threshold intel feels is fine.

I do a lot of computers upgrades on both AMD & Intel based computers. I have ordered over 200 used CPUs in just the last year. For this price range, there is nothing even close, performance wise. I would highly recommend finding a good used motherboard and purchasing this processor.

I happen to have built a new I7-4790K system back in 2014, that still runs everything I throw at it. I was shocked that there is very little difference in the performance of the used I7-3770 based systems I am building and my system at home.

I just spent 7k upgrading an entire schools computers, if I had only known that I could have replaced MB for $15. 00, factory PS for $25. 00, reused the factory memory and bought these processors instead, the computers I upgraded would have been 2-3x more powerful.

Only affordable 8 threaded cpu, next step is more than double the price for less than 20% performance increase.

This seems to be a good upgrade for the i3-3220T processor that I originally used for this particular build. With the i7-3770 I’m getting better than 2X the single-thread performance for python3 code, and the OEM cooler is still holding the core temps well within spec without making much noise.

I rated “easy-to-install” question as a “no”, NOT because of any issue with the processor itself, but due to the Intel OEM heatsink/fan assembly; the trashy plastic tool-less binding posts for the assembly are a real pain, and for the 2X higher heat dissipation of the i7, it’s essential to be sure the heatsink is pulled down properly.

This CPU upgrade with a new faster SSD buys me a few more years without having to build an entire new system. ASUS EZbios was a no-brainer to upgrade and only took a few minutes to execute. After that I popped this CPU in place of the original i5.

Had to reboot twice for everything to settle down but pretty much flawless. “Windows Experience” in WIN7PRO is almost at max level so this is about as good as my old computer will ever be. I’ll build a new system from scratch in a few years.

Great processor even though its four years old. If we aren’t counting refreshes and only architectures this Devil’s Canyon chip is only one generation behind current Intel offerings. Some people say that you’re better off upgrading to a whole new system; but if you are looking for a decent performance boost and you have a Haswell-compatible i3 or i5 system, this is a reasonable avenue to take imho.

These cost between $185 and $210 in early 2019- the price of new RAM, a competing processor performance-wise, and a worthwhile motherboard would be over double that. Though beware- stock coolers are not an option with the Haswell i7’s.

It stayed around 40c at idle, but once it was under any load longer than a few seconds it thermal throttles. It probably wouldn’t if Intel kept the same size aluminium heat sink and copper lug design from the Core 2 days, that thing was a decent cooler, but they are almost half the size with this series of processors.

Water or high thermal capacity air cooling only with these guys. That being said, I have delidded mine and applied liquid metal between the die and heat spreader. I have it nudged up to 4. 6ghz on overclock (seller, dont worry, i’m not going to demand a return)I see temps around 30c at idle and 50-55c while gaming.

Intense load like Aida64 or Prime95 get me up to the low 60’s, with my highest core peaking around 64c. I could push it higher, especially if I had a better motherboard than I do, but this setup should last a couple years at least.

I ordered an i7 4790k CPU, and that’s exactly what I got. No problems or hiccups, it just works like I would expect it to. I haven’t tried overclocking it or anything, not that overclockability would reflect on the seller in any way.

4 cores, 8 threads, handles all the multitasking and gaming I want to do with ease. It’s a pretty dated CPU at this point (late 2021), but it’s easily capable of doing what I want it to do (occasional gaming and heavy multitasking/productivity).

This cpu is competitive with cpu’s from 2 generations later. That makes it one of the best buys of 2009. Today it is a great cpu to take a ageing X58 platform to its maximum potential. The bigger brothers of this cpu the 980, 980x, 990x are all well overpriced next to the 970 as of this writeup date.

The 970 gives you the performance and value of a brand new system with a smaller budget. The 6 cores help to future proof it for a few more years. There is a caveat however, the X58 will not receive another upgrade as it is retired and boards compatible with the 970 will start to get scarce.

Make sure you have a good warranty on the motherboard that you purchase with this CPU. Update: It’s now 2019 and the best buy would be a W3690 CPU for this socket in a single CPU system if you actually still needed one.

For a dual CPU system the X5690 would be what you are looking for. Note I have placed two of those in my 2008 Mac Pro with some other modifications and bios updates to allow it to think its a 2009 Mac Pro and I now have it running Catalina.

So if you are looking for a processor for the aging Mac Pro the 970 is no longer what your looking for.

Upgrading from a 920, I could clearly see the difference between a normal processor and an extreme one; It is extremely easy to overclock, and dissipates much less heat than the 920!!! It is an “old” product, but with its 6 cores/ 12 threads at 4+ GHZ (oc’d), it’s going to make me happy for some years to come!!! If anyone is still on the 1366 platform like myself, I recommend they jump on one of these because they provide a huge boost in performance.

The 990x costs 100+ dollas more than the 980x in ebay, which doesn’t make sense because they are almost the same (+133mhz). All in all, if you still have a 1366 motherboard, this processor is the best choice for you.

When trying to breathe some new life into an aging LGA1366 motherboard (Asus P6T Deluxe) which had a Core i7-920, I did some research and found that the Core i7-980 was the last processor in the LGA1366 socket configuration to be released, while the 920 was one of the very first, so this was a huge step up.

It runs great! Due to a nearly 30% shrink in manufacturing process, it runs a lot cooler than the 920 did, even though it has 2 more cores and a 50% higher clock speed! My PC is 8 years old now (wow), and with this CPU and a bit more memory, I expect I’ll be quite happy with it for at least another 5 years.

My first build in a long time. Read a lot of reviews on here and other sites which helped a lot. What I ended up going with is as follows, and is all worked well IMHO, with all the parts fitting like they should and working like expected.

I7-4770K Asus VI Hero MOBO N82E16813131989 RipJaws memory F3-2133C9D-16GXH N82E16820231571 Cooler is a NH-U14S N82E16835608041 Fractal R4 case N82E16811352021 PSU is a SeaSonic G Series SSR-550RM N82E16817151119 SSD 840 Pro 256G N82E16820147193 HDD 3T, 7200 N82E16822148844 Video Card MSI GTX760 N82E16814127745 Notes, The ram fit just nicely in front of the of the rather large Noctua cooler.

The RAM heatsinks do miss the shroud of the CPU cooler. The cooler fit easily into the R4 case and the PSU has tons of power for everything. I wanted a Gold PSU and one that was not so big that I was always running a 5% of rated power.

FYI, With a Kill A Watt meter (these measurements are without video card, using I7 for video) on the power bar, the PSU draws (input to PSU) about; 35 Watts with computer doing minimal tasks (idle) like websurfing and typing reviews.

90 Watts max when running the WEI benchmarks. This was a decent improvement over my old Opty 185, plus this system goes in and out of sleep very well. With router DIR655 (5W) and SURFboard cable modem (5.

1W), 24″ monitor (43W), the computer and peripherals seem to surf the web (idling) at about 103 Watts. During a load, like the benchmark, it jumps up to about 155 Watts. When it putts itself and the monitor to sleep I read about 21.

8 watts to the PSU. This idle power on this computer is about 75W less than the one I replaced, and it will go to sleep properly, so some nice power saving if you care about that. Now with the video card I see a max draw of about 280 Watts (total with monitor and everything else) when playing the free game that came with it (AC4).

So, I was worried about the 550 W being too small, but after taking measurements, I am no where near drawing even half what this power supply is rated at putting out. A quick estimate is this PUS is drawing about 207W (280-43(monitor) – 30 (modem, router, speakers)), if eff=85%, then the output is only about 175W, still lots of PSU left,,, cool, & quiet.

Happy with it. May overclock a bit, as everything is 7. 9 except CPU is 7. 8, so for fun will want to see all 7. 9. Game plays much better with video card, it was not that good with just on board. Plus the MOBO had one video out, and wify wants two monitors for her work,, I missed that when I switched from the Sabertooth to the Hero MOBO last minute.

The Sabertooth has 3 outputs, this one only has HDMI out,, thus the video card. but the game is kinda cool, LOL.

The chip arrived promptly in oversealed packaging. The CPU lid is scuffed in the upper right quadrant, probably from an overtightened heatsink. Aside from the slight damage, the lid was rather clean of defects and remaining thermal compound.

Installation was easy on a Z97 board. I was not able to achieve a stable overclock past 4. 0 gHz on this chip, (which is dissapointing) however this could very well be do to my own limited experience.

Otherwise the chip runs fine at stock and OCd to 4. 0 gHz.

This was a day one purchase for me and it seems clear I’ve either lost the silicon lottery, or a lot of people are fudging numbers/not being very stringent with stress testing. Running this on a 240mm custom loop, I’ve hit a voltage wall at around 1.

44v @ x50 to be stable in Prime95 AVX. Vcore reads 1. 314 at that load with LLC4, so I’m ok with the worryingly high BIOS input. Now there is a lot of controversy around whether P95 AVX is a valid stress test, as it is an incredibly unrealistic workload.

My opinion on this is that the point of a stress test is to simulate unrealistic workloads at the far end of sanity, to ensure that your daily driver is rock stable. I can get nice low voltage overclocks if I avoid the nasty AVX loads, but that doesn’t really seem fair.

I think 5. 1 is achievable, but requires a better bin and better cooling than I have to stay below 1. 45v. There’s also a question of memory speeds, as my memory is quite heavily overclocked as well (rated at 4400MHz CAS 19).

Downclocking the memory might give me more headroom, but without more experimenting I suspect the performance dip in overall workloads might not be worth 100MHz of clock speed. If you’re going to get into the nitty gritty of tweaking your CPU, I recommend moving up to the 10900k for the better binning.

General results suggest the binning is much tighter for that SKU, so you’ll have less of a silicon lottery problem. I’ll probably do this myself after I finish this build in a few months. The egg I took off is pretty much exclusively for loose binning at this SKU.

Relevant hardware: ASUS Z490-i Patriot Viper 2x8GB @ 4400MHz EKWB 240 PE, with about 500ml in the loop altogether, with 2x Noctua NF-F12 static pressure fans Ncase M1 (You will likely get better results with more space to move air, and more radiator space) I’ll come back and edit this review in a few months if I have a different opinion once my new GPU and slim radiator arrive, and the build is complete.

READ FIRST: CLAIMED CINEBENCH SCORES AND TEMPERATURE ALLEGATIONS First of, i would like to call out almost EVERY major reviewer and benchmarker out on the internet for the following: LEAVING MCE ON! MCE for those who dont know the term, is Multi Core Enhancements, BUT it may have a different name depending on the MB Manufacturer, in my case MSI names it ENHANCED TURBO and it comes ON by default.

What it is is basically a MB overclock, boosting all core and single core clocks as well as a horribly high voltage. Since its not tuned properly it just outputs such a high voltage to “guarantee” a safe overclock, at the expense on temps of course.

This option is NOT STOCK, so naturally Cinebench scores are 510-520 single and 5100-5300 multi, but with temps up in the 90c, cooking with an AIO A TRUE stock i7 10700k will do 480-490 single 4800-4950 multi but with temps as high as 75c with the same AIO.

SO if you plan on running STOCK be sure to disable this feature as its basically a trash factory overclock. If you are gonna OC, then you probably know what your doing so thats that. Excellent cpu, hands down.

People constantly ask me why i got this cpu if 1. there is AMD, and 2. the 10600k is better for gaming, which i do the most. The reason is that i come from an i5 4670k, which 6 years ago was a better offering for gaming than the i7 4770k.

Today the 4670k is doing 100% load and bottlenecking in games like COD Warzone, while the i7 4770k is still doing ok. So in theory X years from now the i5 10600k will be struggling while the i7 with the extra 2 cores perhaps will have still some life left.

And for AMD im simply not interested in what they offer, as simple as that. I mean if i buy a Ford is because i like Ford as a brand, and why should i be inclined to buy a Toyota for example? Intel is my choice, not because its better or not than AMD, just because i want it period.