my goal is 80 Celcius max under heavy load
Why? Intel says that their CPUs can run reliably long term at core temperatures up to 100°C. That is why Intel sets the thermal throttling temperature to 100°C. Under 100°C is safe and over 100°C is not safe. The CPU is designed to automatically throttle and slow down as much as necessary to keep the CPU at a safe temperature. Intel CPUs are well engineered.
Lower temperatures are good and all that but do not kill yourself trying to reach some unrealistic temperature. Most recent gaming laptops run hot because Intel says it is OK to run their CPUs hot.
Fan speeds are usually not linked to the core temperature sensors. Core temperatures can change instantaneously. If fan speed was based on that, most users would find it to be annoying with the fan constantly spooling up and down. Laptop fans are usually triggered by a different temperature sensor that changes temperature much slower compared to the core temperature. That is why when you go to full load it takes 10 seconds for the fans to finally react. It has proven difficult to come up with the perfect fan algorithm that spools up quickly when needed but is not annoying to end users by constantly over reacting. It sounds like your fan is working normally.
Windows schedules tasks on any available core. This can happen 60 times every second. It tries to keep the same task on the same core as long as possible but sometimes a different task needs that specific core so the task gets bumped to another core. This happens constantly so a single task might end up spending half of its time on one core and half of its time on a different core. Once again, there is lots of room for improvement in the algorithm that controls this. I think Windows 11 is supposed to be better at this.
If you want to force a task to run on a specific core, open the Task Manager, go to the Details tab, right click on the task and select the Set affinity menu option. This allows you to tell Windows to only schedule your task on specific cores.
You can change the Processor Affinity to force the TS Bench to run on whatever core or cores you like but I would avoid doing this to ThrottleStop. Why? If you tell Windows that ThrottleStop is not allowed to run on all cores then ThrottleStop will not be able to access those cores to monitor them. When doing this kind of testing, it would be a good idea to use a different program to load the CPU. That way you can change the Processor Affinity and move that other stress testing program around from core to core without causing any problems for the monitoring portion of ThrottleStop.
This example shows when ThrottleStop is limited to the last 2 cores (4 threads) of the CPU.
The monitoring data for the first 8 cores is no longer available because of the Processor Affinity setting.
If your CPU has more than 8 threads, you can double click on the ThrottleStop monitoring table to get an expanded view of all threads.
