Temperatures

Temperature testing isn’t something I always cover in CPU testing only because it is sometimes hard to compare results from one motherboard to another or one CPU cooler to another. In this case I was able to do this with the 3970X and the 4960X. Our Intel water cooling kit is getting a little aged and noisy but still holds up. I put it to the test when testing each CPU while running Prime95 for a half hour each. As you can see from the results below the difference between the two is staggering. The 3970X’s high clock speed and larger manufacturing process really heat things up while the 4960X stayed at a reasonable temperature. With better cooling you could do much better than this as well!