I have a Thermalright HR-02 Macho heatsink mounted on the 3770K cpu using AS5. My idle temp is around ~38C. Is this normal? I've seen others get it in the low 30s or upper 20s (air cooling). Bear in mind it's a new desktop. I heard AS5 needs to be broken in. Will it improve much?

Idle temperature by itself is rather meaningless whether it says 20, 30, 40, or even 50 depending on the circumstances. All is well as long as the load temp is okay. It's not too unusual for one of the CPU core probes to show a physically impossibly low idle reading, or a motherboards socket temp probe to be off by a good margin.

I have the same CPU and heatsink, and my idle temperature is 34°C, with the fan at ~600RPM.

Nevermind. The 38°C is according to the BIOS. Asrock's tuning utility shows 29°C - 30°C. Excellent. I'm gonna overclock this baby later on after the 200 hr break-in.

What about other monitoring software like Speedfan or Core Temp.