G'day all!

After 2 months and 2 returns I've finall got a working motherboard. I've started working on the OC for my i7 again with stability at 4.2 ghz. What I have noticed is the first core runs between 5-11 degrees warmer than all of the other cores. Is this normal, or should I be looking at something like reappling the thermal compound?

To give you an idea of my situation, core 1 runs at 80 during OCCT while the others are 73, 75 and 69. These temps come from RealTemp 3.00.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that when it is idle the temps are 45, 39, 45, 39 (I have a relatively high ambient temp)

Great, I just wanted to make sure that it is all normal. I had a feeling that it was due to more processes running on core 1.

Thanks, I'm really surprised it is stable. I've improved on those temps as well. I'm now running load at 73-77 max. I had a RAM cooler installed and it was sitting right in front of the fan on my TRU-120. It was robbing some of the air intake from the fan so there wasn't as much airflow through the heat sink. After removing the RAM cooler the temps on my CPU improved.

The settings i'm running:

Mult: 21x
bclck: 200 mhz
RAM: 1603 mhz
uclck: 3206 mhz
QPI: 7218 MT/s
Vcore: 1.35v
PLL: Auto
Vtt/QPI: 1.33125v
VRAM: 1.64
Load Line: Enabled
CPU spread Spectrum: Disabled
PCIE spread spectrum: Disabled
HT: Disabled
CState: disabled
TM: Disabled
Turbo: Disabled
CPU Differential Amplitude: 800mv

For me the differential amplitude and load line settings are what made it stable, also keeping the PLL on auto for me is more stable than upping it to a higher value. I've also got my RAM timings tightened from 9-9-9-24-2T to 8-8-8-22-1T. All of this passes OCCT without any issues. J, have you tried a higher clock with the differential amplitude and PLL settings like above?

I'm running a 940. I've been doing some playing today and found if I want HT on I need to drop the Bclock 191 and that's it. All is perfectly stable in OCCT for 3 passes +. I've noticed though that with HT on that the temps bounce around a lot more with fluctuations of around 10 degrees

I think I may have won the chip lottery when I got this one. I'm running a fairly standard set-up:

Antec 900 case with all fans on full
TRUE 120
Generic white paste for thermal compound
6 gig ram
Asus p6t deluxe
GTX280 OCed

I've also done some minor case modding to tidy up the cables and improve airflow. I've got a very linear airflow through the case in two streams seperated by the video card. The bottom half goes under the card and gets sucked out via the PSU. The top goes over the video card, over the RAM and NB heatsinks, through the 120 and out the top and rear through two fans. It also has a negative net pressure so fresh air is sucked in through the side and front grills

Those settings take me to 79-80 max (for a few seconds) and 76 average during a stress test on OCCT. Ambient temps are around the 25 celsius mark. We're just coming out of summer so temps will be better in a few months. The setting that makes the most difference is the HT. As soon as I turn it on I need to take the clock down a bit for it to stay stable and under temp.