Stock cooler temperatures are currently at Haswell levels.
Stock cooler temperatures are currently at Haswell levels.
Assisted a coworker recently. He installed an i5-4590 + RX480 gaming rig about five years back. After removing an i7-4790 (non-K) from an old system, we simply upgraded it. His original cooler works fine, but temperatures are quite high—desktop idle hits the high 40s Celsius. Since there were no heavy loads, we ran a stress test in CPU-Z. The default setting peaked in the high 60s Celsius. I switched it to AVX2 mode, which brought temps down into the high 90s, but not long enough to confirm throttling. Both CPUs have an 84W TDP rating, so the i5 cooler should handle the i7 just fine. These are not overclocked, so that’s not a concern. His main activity is playing Sea of Thieves and streaming with a capture card on the same machine. I don’t know the exact usage stats, but he’s considering a replacement. He’s also thinking about giving it to his girlfriend for Illustrator work. I wonder if my concern is excessive—am I overreacting?
Still, cooling limits performance. I should note this older Intel model uses a copper core, unlike the later all-aluminum ones. If he decides to upgrade, it's up to him. The CPU change was a bit of a coincidence and these extra threads might help for now. Also, the cooler I received came from a Dell build, so it didn't have standard mounts and couldn't be swapped out. It felt heavier than the Intel version.
Temps are in safe zone for the most part. Did you check the thermal compound ? Like @Kilrah sai, will only start to throttle when it reaches those high temps. Also like @porina said, if he's going to upgrade there's no point unless his girlfriend starts to see a major performance hit. All you can really do is monitor temps as time goes on. You should check the thermal paste and see if it needs to be replaced.
We reused the Thermal Grizly Kryonaut after swapping CPUs. I demonstrated hwinfo64 so he can run it in the background during future games to monitor performance, since that’s his main purpose. I’m unsure if the GPU-Z AVX2 stress resembles Prime95 behavior and could actually be more demanding. He didn’t throttle right away even though temperatures were nearing limits.
I won’t be able to use the system anymore, and he isn’t particularly interested in software. I believe checking the game temperatures is sufficient.
The AVX2 workload puts extra strain compared to typical tasks, though not as high as peak p95 but still noticeable. On my 5960X I can sustain 4.4 across all cores throughout long sessions with heavy demands like gaming, compilation, and video rendering. Under normal conditions it stays at 4.4, but under AVX stress it drops to around 3.8. With p95 AVX performance it falls further to 2.8...