Hi,
I have a I7 4970K and a Gigabyte GT Z97 motherboard. When I run a Prime95 or the IntelBurnTest RealTemp says the temperatures are in the mid 90s. When I look at the Gigabyte Hardware monitor it says the temperature is in the high 70s low 80s. I'm running at 4.4 ghz. Could someone tell me what temperature is more accurate? Thanks.
David
The only thought I can offer at the moment involves "specification" history during the year or two after the Kentsfield Q6600 was introduced. Somebody miss-stated the T-junction spec for the processor: the temperature where the processor throttles to protect itself.
Software reporting temperatures of the internal processor sensors uses Tj to compute the actual temperature. I've forgotten the specifics, but an incorrect Tj will lead to incorrect temperature readings.
That's just one thing that can happen. Use of different softwares will also give different readings: for instance, the ASUS Ai-Suite Monitor is notorious for the temperature shown lower than what HWMonitor or AIDA-64 would show. There might be a "method to their madness," since the temperature reported is usually about 10C lower than the average-of-cores, or what one might expect for a "TCASE"
[*] spec temperature, but this latter is a spec so archaic it would be "mythical."
The ASUS example parallels my guess about your Gigabyte software. RealTemp is more "realistic," as would be "CoreTemp," CPUID's HWMonitor or the AIDA-64 readings. But you should assure that any freeware or paid license involves a version produced after your processor release. The difference between the i7-4790K and the 4770K wouldn't be great enough -- they're essentially Haswell and "same-socket." So just get the latest extant version of the temperature-monitoring software, and go from there.
* TCASE was a thermal guideline for computer-case design. It supposedly specified a temperature taken at the heatspreader (IHS) dead-center, usually found to be about 10C or so lower than the core-average. If your processor is within this spec, you could figure the processor is "reasonably safe," but then -- you can't easily measure such a temperature, can you?