Benchmarks: Temperature and Noise
Read into this what you will. Temperatures are excellent when idle and while gaming, but apply maximum load to the CPU and the chip in our review sample gets surprisingly warm. This could be a consequence of the beta BIOS, but in our own tests the Core i7-6700K hit 74ºC when strapped to a huge Noctua NH-D15.
Overclocked Skylake will run warmer than Haswell at the same frequency, it seems, and that has a knock-on effect on noise. Our review machine kept a reasonably quiet 36.8dB when idle. That number rose to a comfortable 39.4dB when gaming, but it was under CPU-intensive workloads that noise levels rose, with our sound meter recording a clearly audible 43.6dB while encoding 4K video.
