Hey duders,

I have a few questions about upgrading my PC and the parts i would keep.

My current setup: ASUS P8P67 mobo, I7 2600K, Nvidia 680GTX, 16GBDDR3

Originally i was only planning on upgrading to a 980GTX and leave the rest, as my own research and the assurance on this forum pointed out that my 2600K would not bottleneck the Gfx card. Since the recent announcement of the 1080 i will probably go for that one. But the thing that worries me is that looking at my CPU temps i'm not sure if they are healthy, and looking at forums some say yes and others say no. Thinking i could solve this by changing the cooler had a positive effect but i'm still not certain about it.

With my previous cooler i noticed that while idling the cores were in the high 40°C range, with spikes of +10° whenever i do something like starting up the browser. While i was playing ARK survival evolved the temperatures would go up to mid 80°C even hitting low 90's on occasion.

So, installed new cooler today and the result are better: idling between 35&43°C and while playing ARK between 58 and peaking at 67°C, at this moment i'm thinking i solved it, a bit high for my taste but a difference of 20°. After that i start up Project CARS and it is between 70-75°C. Did a Prime95 test with the new cooler and all in the high 70°C range. As far as i can see the cooler is fitted correctly, took it of put it back on and made no difference.

I think these temps are still pretty high and i am worried they will go higher when i put a stronger Gfx Card in there and turn up setting for all my games. This makes me consider also retiring the CPU but i was hoping to delay that.

So i would love to hear your thoughts on what to do, and on the consequences of only upgrading the GPU?

If you guys think keeping the 2600K is not the best idea, then you can guess the next question ;-)

Thx in advance!

EDIT: Also, since two days ago sometimes my screens appear the be disconnecting and connecting again... First i thought it had something to do with Ark but then it happened while just browsing the internet. Also over the last two days i have noticed a dosbox appearing and dissappearing within a second. both these things started after upgrading NVIDIA drivers but this is probably coincidence. These issues seem totally unrelated but i thought i'd mention them on the off chance somebody knows what it is ;-)

I also have a 2600k and it sits at 70 most of the time. I only have a stock cooler. I'm going to maybe upgrade from a 970 to a 1070 if I can get a good deal, but I've been told that it's still a good CPU so I haven't upgraded that part.

My temps are really bad so I'd say those look pretty good but that's relative. I'd be pretty interested in answers to this too since I should probably get a new cooling solution.

@tomaussie: I see people complain all the time about temps. I had a I5-2500 or something that was hitting low/mid 90s with a stock cooler on an old Dell. Which honestly did worry me, but nothing ever happened, and it ran like that for several years. I feel like my GTX 770 hits high 70s, low 80s under load, but I really havent checked what it runs at in a year or two.

If it is actually over heating your PC should just shut down to protect itself. Or slow the clock speed. Honestly I could never see that was happening on the CPU for my I5-2500.

Newer CPUs are designed to be able to run hotter. If it's staying under 90 while stressed there's really nothing to worry about.

Your new temps seem fine but i would get worried about going over 70 but even that would probably be fine.

Roll back your nvidia drivers and see of that fixes the issue, ive found with nvidia its best to not upgrade drivers unless you are having specific issue as they are buggy as hell most the time. If your running an hdmi check and make sure it's good.

I've always held a rule of thumb as to try to keep temps of any device down as low as possible within reason, the hotter something runs there is the potential to shorten the lifespan of the device. However, if full load is 70C that would be about the norm and is completely fine. I average mid 60's but i've got one of those Noctua NHD-15 monster heatsinks on my 2600k sitting inside a high airflow case. I would only start freaking out if load temps sit around 85+ range myself.

As for upgrading more than just the GPU, that is a question more for yourself than others. the i7 2600K is a beast of a CPU, and even though it's now 5 years old it can still keep pace with the newer Core i7s out there. From what I can tell, outside of the extreme editions or the 6-8 core i7s the 2600K only really falls behind in terms of power efficiency with the newer variants of the i7. I believe just recently the 6700K finally surpassed the actual processing performance of the 2600K (a potential increase of 25~30% in some instances), and that gem just came to market last fall.

With the current landscape of how games operate and are mostly GPU bound in terms of what drives their performance I don't see any consequences at the moment. I would hang onto the 2600K for now unless you're dead set you need the best performance from your rig. With nVidia's announcement of the GTX 1080, and intel teasing the 7700K sometime later this year, waiting might be the better option if you're dead set on upgrading the entire Rig.

As for why your monitor goes black or disconnects and reconnects, odds are that is caused by the display drivers crashing and re-establishing themselves. If this just started after upgrading the drivers try rolling them back to a previous version and see if it continues. However, it might also be worth checking to make sure all your cables are properly connected and that your GPU is seated properly. But I'm betting it's probably something to do with the new display drivers.

@tomaussie: Assuming your monitoring program is measuring the junction temperature (probably the case), 70-80°C is fine. The i7-2600K has a tjmax of 98°C, so anything up to that shouldn't damage it (though lower is probably better for longevity, and I think throttling kicks in around 95°C).

I've got a i7-4770K, and overclocked I've seen that hit 80°C even when water-cooled, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

I'm pretty sure all modern Intel processors will throttle themselves automatically near their maximum operating temperature, and will completely shutdown if that temperature is exceeded by a set threshold. If that isn't happening, it's a decent sign you have nothing to worry about.

I cant say I know what Im talking about far as temps. But I dont feel like people who are/should be informed really know what they are talking about either. I see so many people getting scared with high 70s or temps in the 80s. Recent article on the GTX 1080 said it was at 67C under load, and the guy writing the article said thats hotter then I would like my card at. Im like WTF?! 67C? Are you shitting me?! As I said before my I5-2500 was running in the 90s under load. That is pretty fucking hot, but I never had issues with it. CPU ran for prob 3+ years, never died on me.

This thread is actually kind of refreshing. I was getting nervous about my overclocked i5 running at like 50C under full load.

That's normal for a stock cooler, the thermal max on Sandy Bridge is something like 90-95 before throttling.

As long as you are staying under or right around 90c under load you should be okay. Any higher than that and things get sketchy. If it's really an issue for you I would recommend new/better fans and/or a case with better airflow. But from what you've said things seem to be okay. You might have some issues trying to overclock, but at stock temps you should be fine.

Yup. Even then, the newer Intel stuff is so efficient these days that I can't see that happening without a massive overclock or doing something stupid like running without a heatsink. It's not like the old days with where your shit would just crash randomly and you just hope nothing got fried. Those AMD Athlon 64 chips where pretty sketch when it came to that.. Had more than a few panic attacks messing around with those things. Ahhh the good 'ol days!

I think it depends on perspective. If you're an air cooler, 67c at load isn't too bad, actually pretty good. Now if you're someone who paid $1,000+ for a nice water cooling setup and are getting 67c at load, you'd probably be pissed off with all the money you've wasted. A constant 90-95c seems to be the cut-off where you start to see problems with stability and hardware longevity depending on what we're talking about. Thankfully the more recent hardware will throttle itself or shut down before it gets to the point of damage so it's not really as much of an issue as it was a few years ago. With how efficient and cool the new Intel CPUs are running and newer cards that Nvidia is putting out over the last generation, I'm not too worried about temps at all anymore. You'd have to be doing something really messed up to kill a modern GPU or CPU with overheating. I mean, under load things are going to get hot. No way around that, especially if you overclock, but what people are really worried about is idle temps. Running at 90c under 100% load isn't a good thing but won't hurt much, but that same chip running at 90c when idle or under light load... That's something to be worried about.

This is just a general question that OP mentioned but how can you determine if a card will be bottlenecked by a GPU? Are their specs you can compare or does it only reveal itself in practice?

@hayt Only in practice. If you benchmark a game (or ideally a set of games) and it runs better with say a i7 6700K than it does on a i7 2600K, then the 2600K is the bottleneck. If the game runs the same on both processors, then the GPU is the bottleneck.

While it's true that running your CPU at 90c won't damage it, you run the risk of your CPU throttling it's speed to limit heat output. Intel CPU's begin to throttle down significantly when they approach 100c. (Your 4.2ghz CPU becomes a 1ghz CPU) As a general rule of thumb, you should never run your CPU at above 80c. As far as upgrading your CPU to the newer Skylake's, plenty of benchmarks show that this may be a wise decision. It is dependent on the game however, games that are heavily physics based will need more CPU horsepower.

Id tried to look up what temps are ok off and on, answers always seems to be all over the map. I just see so many people that get worried when they get over 65 C, and thats running pretty fucking cool imo. I dont claim to feel like I am super informed on the issue, but based on past experience Ive never had a prob with stock coolers.

If you have your shit water cooled, fine what ever, but even then long as you arent breaking 80 C is....Ehhhhh, pretty good if its insanely over clocked I would think? I honestly wont go with a stock CPU cooler anymore though. Those are just worthless. Spend 15-20$ on a better heat sync, but unless you are OC your GPU/CPU as far as humanly possible it kinda blows my mind when people spend 100s of dollars on cooling.

Like I said article on a stock GTX 1080 and the guy is like 67 C is pretty cool, but higher then I like to run my cards. That just kinda blows my mind. I have a long history with PC gaming, first heat sync I ever bought was $15 heat sync for my current CPU a I7-4970k which I do have OC to like 4.2 or 4.3 GHz. Ive never had a part fail or throttle far as I could tell due to over heating, and that I5-2500 or w/e was pretty much maxed out trying to run AC Unity hitting mid to high 90s. Which did have me pretty worried lol. Even then cant say it throttled, but Im not sure how to check for that other then seeing the PC start to lag badly.

You can download programs like HWMonitor. They run in the background and monitor things like voltage, temps, fan speed and cpu/gpu usage. MSI Afterburner also has similar functionality, but not as complete as HWMonitor.

http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html

I totally missed that his card is fairly old but 90 is perfectly fine for newer Intel CPUs. They don't start throttling until 104-105.

For an overclocked CPU at full load that might as well be ice cold.