Intel Core i7-6950X Processor Review – 10-core Broadwell-E Benchmarked

By Nathan Kirsch

Intel Core i7-6950X CPU Temperature Testing

Intel no longer comments on the Thermal Interface Material (TIM) material that they use on processors, but we are fairly certain that the Intel Core i7-6950X uses Next-Generation Polymer Thermal Interface Material (NGPTIM). Let’s take a look at the processors thermal performance.

idle-temp

We used the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility v6.0.2.8 to monitor the temperatures on our X99 test system with the Corsair H105 water cooler along with Gelid Extreme Thermal Compound. The Intel Core i7-6950X processor sitting on the desktop had a package temperature of 32C and the voltage was set to 0.8060V. The room temperature was 24C.

6950x-load-temp

When we ran a run of Prime 95 and found that the processor temperature topped out at 61C and the voltage jumped up to 1.107V during this workload,. We are pretty impressed with these temperatures as they are quite good considering this is a 10-core processor.

overclock-xtu

After manually setting the voltage to 1.27V and set all cores to a 40x multiplier for a 4GHz clock speed we were seeing 68C load temps. Sure the temperature was 7C higher for the same test, but that isn’t had considering the Core i7-6950X is running 500MHz faster and has a higher voltage set!