One of the key reasons I have refrained from using Intel LGA-775 CPUs in my main system for the recent past is heat issues. Intel’s CPUs draw a lot of power and generate a lot of heat, especially with Intel’s retail CPUs on the market right now. The 820 CPU, on the other hand exhibited no problems with temperature readings of the BIOS on the motherboards we tested it with. Intel states the CPU draws a maximum of 85W of power, a far cry from the 130W of the bigger brother, the 840EE.

Setting up the 2.8D on a 955X board from Gigabyte, the i955X Royal, the CPU was found immediately on boot and correctly identified by the BIOS screen. The first thing I do when instlaling a LGA-775 CPU is go into the BIOS Setup screen and check the Hardware Monitor for the temperature reading. In this instance, the 820 CPU read 45C a very respectable temperature for a LGA-775 CPU. At no time during testing was the problems that were seen when testing the 840 Extreme Edition CPU.

The 670 CPU, on the other hand had a few issues with heat. Using the same Intel reference cooling fan as in the dual-core setup, I found the CPU to heat up to a toasty 70C. That’s the very close to the low shutdown temperature found in the BIOS. Had I set the temperature to 70C as is by default, the computer would have shut down during testing, not a good thing. Fortunately, I set the shutdown temperature to 85C and went my merry way. Stability was excellent throughout the CPU testing on both CPUs. At no time was there a crash or restart of the computer when running tests. Intel obviously has done a lot of work on their thermal issues. Intel included a new heat sink/fan design to go along with their dual core CPUs. This HSF has more copper content allowing heat to better dissipate away from the CPU.