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Thought it might be interesting. Last night I assembled my new computer, installed, run and played Dayz for about 3 hours. Today in the morning installed HWMonitor of curiosity to have a look at temps - 100 degress Celsius on idle. Restart, checked in BIOS - the same.

Apparently I had not pushed well the heatsink push-pins. I know, a newbie job. The processor worked for hours w/o cooling, other than its own integrated heatsink. Replaced the heatsink, temperature is 35-40 degress, it is all right. I am happy the trottling is made so well - to limit the processor, without me even noticing - not a single crash or shutdown.

Thermal throttling saved your butt

I have the same cpu in my computer, and I'm glad read this information you posted. But that makes me wonder, maybe we could run this cpu at full speed with passive cooling? Or maybe just with the help of a case fan?

Running the CPU that hot for long will definitely shorten its life. I would not recommend it. Stick with a fan, keep temps under 60C.

I doubt it was actually operating totally without the heatsink. I'm sure there was at least some contact with the CPU, and as such, dissipated enough heat to keep the thing running. I can't imagine what temp it got up to while playing a game though. You're one lucky dude.

An Ivy Bridge CPU's TJmax is 105C so 100 is actually surviveable for short amount of time and it have built in throttling feature to save it at that temperature, but you definately need to have to pay closer attention to your hardware next time. I set up my temperature monitoring system(RealTemp) to give me a warning sound anytime the package reaches 85C. Only got their once when toying with with 3.8 Ghz OC on my 3570K with stock heatsink and I shut down Prime Torture Blend immediately. I know have a Hyper 212 Evo cooler running and my CPU temp haven't gone past 60 since(23 C ambient) the installation.

It was making partial contact, or the CPU would have forced poweroff once throttling/underclocking could no longer maintain 100C.

As for how hot at peak? Same 100C, plus or minus a degree or two. 100C is where Intel CPUs panic and begin implementing dramatic measures to self-preserve.

Yeah, this shouldn't really be titled "works w/o heatsink", it should really be "survives without heatsink"

I did the same with my old e5200 several years ago. Didn't clip the heatsink down all the way. WoW was running really rough, I couldn't figure out why until I saw the CPU temp at... 97-100C. That was a great CPU, $97 and overclocked it to 3.8ghz.

Remembers S462, sheds tear... those things actually let out the 'blue smoke' when you did that. Fried instantly. Intel CPUs seem to have been much more survivable.

Very impressive indeed - intel certainly got the thermal throttling working.