I just built myself a new i7 2600k system with an Intel DP67BA motherboard. Booted into BIOS and was alarmed to find Processor temp reported at 75 C, and steadily rising... sat there while it rose to 91 C. Updated BIOS... same thing. Removed the heat sink, removed stock thermal compound and applied Arctic Silver 5 (carefully following all instructions form Arctic Silver's website). Booted into BIOS... same thing. Temps seemed even a bit hotter.
Decided to go ahead and install Windows anyway, and see what RealTemp/Speedfan had to say. Install successful, ran RealTemp, and it's telling me my core temps are sitting at 36 C. Same thing in Speedfan. Ran a stress test in Prime 95, and temps did indeed rise, up to 90 C. But obviously they couldn't have been at 90 C to begin with, then.
90 C under load is obviously quite high, but I'm sitting in the desert with no AC, with room temperature sitting around 30 C, so 90 under load (with Turbo Boost doing some automatic overclocking, I assume) doesn't really surprise me that much (though it's still high). It's the BIOS temp that had me really worried, and still concerns me.
So... what should I make of all this? Doing a little research online seems to indicate that cpu load in BIOS can range from 80-100% depending on the mobo, which surprised me (I thought the cpu would be sitting close to idle in BIOS). Do Intel's boards run CPUs at 100% in BIOS? If that's the case, then I guess that would explain the high temps corresponding on the RealTemp temps under Prime 95 stress...
Anyway, any advise/help/thoughts/recommendations are much appreciated. Need to decide whether everything's A-Okay (based on the RealTemp findings, basically), or whether I need to replace my cpu and/or mobo. I'm leaning towards thinking that the BIOS is just screwy, running the CPU on full load... but perhaps that's a bad conclusion?