Uneven thermals across CPU cores? Predator Triton laptop (515-51)

agentofrandom

I recently re-pasted the CPU/GPU in my Acer Predator Triton laptop (515-51) in hopes of fixing it's contant thermal issues.

The CPU is rectangular in shape, so I used the line method (a slightly thick line down the middle with thermal grizzly kryonaut). 

After the repaste, I am getting throttling in HALF the cores, while the other half seem to be fine. Does this indicate I didn't do a good pasting job? I assumed due to the CPU shape that the line would spread over the whole surface, but maybe not. The heatsink did have numbered screws, so I was careful to re-screw them in the same order. Here are the temps as measured by HWINFO:

If not the CPU paste, could anything else cause this uneven  temperature across cores? Thanks!

Leostat

This is normal ish on Intel CPU's. There are two main reasons why, first the load across all cores may not be equal which will lead to uneven temps, and the second is three of the cores are touching the memory controller ( https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Die-Map-of-a-Hexa-Core-Coffee-Lake-Processor_fig6_332543387 )  , which is also pumping out heat. There is someone who descibes it better then me here (  https://www.reddit.com/r/overclocking/comments/d56p8u/cpu_core_temperatures_on_half_the_cores_higher_by/  ) 

An uneven spread of thermal paste could effect the temps, the 98c is a *bit* high, but im guessing it was quite a heavy load?

agentofrandom

Leostat said:

This is normal ish on Intel CPU's. There are two main reasons why, first the load across all cores may not be equal which will lead to uneven temps, and the second is three of the cores are touching the memory controller ( https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Die-Map-of-a-Hexa-Core-Coffee-Lake-Processor_fig6_332543387 )  , which is also pumping out heat. There is someone who descibes it better then me here (  https://www.reddit.com/r/overclocking/comments/d56p8u/cpu_core_temperatures_on_half_the_cores_higher_by/  ) 

An uneven spread of thermal paste could effect the temps, the 98c is a *bit* high, but im guessing it was quite a heavy load?

Thanks for the reply. Yes, heavy load, I use Assasins Creed Odyssey for testing as it’s probably the most CPU intensive thing I have. 

I did not have these issues when I first got my laptop though, it seemed to get worse over time and my repaste job didn’t fix it, so I’m thinking I either didn’t spread enough OR didn’t tighten the spreader enough, if that makes sense