Good cooler for I7-920 OC

Golden said:

Pfffttt..........man that is frustrating. I cant remember if you tried this, but if you leave the case open and stick a mains fan on full pointing at it, does it show cooler temps?

Yup. After 30 minutes on a 40cm fan it drops a whopping 1-2 degrees. I got it to flicker between 43 and 44.

I wonder if the i7-920 cpu's I got are a bad batch?

I rang the place where I bought the CPUz and the 950 is now the lowest I7 they sell, at a whopping $332 each.

I'm taking a break. I've been at this now for 5 days. Time to party with the girls.

Hey, this would be a good pick up line for a guy wanting to break the ice.. "Hey, got an overtemp CPU... I can fix that for you". I should be so lucky

I'm taking the system to the shop tmoz. They are going to play around with some other aftermarket coolers. WIll let you know how it goes...

Nite..
Tanya

The higher the vcore, the higher temps at load. NO GETTING AROUND THAT.


EDIT:

Saw your last post - let them deal with it. I'd be interested to see what a 'pro's' opinion is on this.

I have a similar setup with i5-760 CPU and Noctua NH-D14 heatsink; As always, I applied Artic Silver compound using the spread method. The CPU temperature had been high with NH-D14 idling at low forties and maxing out at close to a 80 at full load.

This was unacceptable and looked for ways to lower the temperature. I've actually red Artic Silver recommended application of the thermal compound for my CPU. The document recommended the vertical application of the compound which I've never used. After using the vertical method and basically resetting the heatsink at the same time, the CPU idles at around 30 and mid-fifties when playing games at 20 degree Celsius ambient temperature. The Prime95 pushes the full temperature to low to mid-sixties. Running the system with open case doesn't change the temperatures that much either, around five degrees less for both idle and full load.

OC-ing the system increased the temperature by 10-15 degree, which is too hot at full load. As such, the system is running at its default BIOS settings to keep the temperature down.

While the temperatures are better, I am not convinced that the NH-D14 is that great in my case, literally... It's a big ass, heavy, hard to fit heatsink that doesn't really perform that well. This might be due to the rather flimsy tide down screws that supposedly secures the heatsink to the CPU. The screws look small and the heatsink does not feel well secured. On the flip side, it is certainly quite with the two fans running at full RPMs, around 1,200. Maybe it would need fans with higher RPM to cool better.

I'll probably end up going back to Zalman when summer rolls around in my neck of the woods. I fully anticipate that the NH-D14 going to run too hot during the summer.

smarteyeball said:

Saw your last post - let them deal with it. I'd be interested to see what a 'pro's' opinion is on this.

To start; the base line is that my CPU temp seems to run 22 degrees above room temperature, no matter what I do. I checked temps at home before I took computer to shop. Ambient = 20c CPU, 42c - so far consistent.

Well, these are the outcomes of the tests at the shop.

In shop temps were 42c - same ambient temp.

We swapped 920 for a 950 CPU - no change
We reversed air flow - no change
We put on a stock cooler - No change
We moved GPU to a different PCIe slot (Give front and side fans better flow to Memory and CPU area - No change - GPU temp increased because of lack of space between it and soundcard.
I have two fans pushing air into the case, only one extracting it (not counting the PSU fan) - The rear fan runs at 750 - 800 RPM. The two input fans run at 1800 and 2800 respectively, so it was suggested that I was pushing more air in than the exhaust could take out. So we swapped the front and rear fans - NO CHANGE
Reapplied the thermal paste, but this time we did the line method - No change

Final verdict - GA-EX58-UD3R motherboard must be causing the problem. Hmmm...

PSU runs cool to touch.

What we learnt was that my CPU seems to be fine, and that the 950 runs no cooler. Plus the Noctua NH-U12P is doing absolutely NOTHING in cooling compared to a stock fan!

Where to from here?

Tanya

lol. I wish they were thorough... I had to push the guy, he kept wandering off leaving me to do the testing. But he did have a few new ideas at least.

They didn't have an ex58 handy. We did talk about using an ASUS board but he said he'd heard somewhere that ASUS boards had temp problems.. I've been doing some research and there are a lot of hits for the P6T and P6X58 series of boards. It'll take a while to find a decent one I think.

I have 5 of the same board, all purchased at the same time. Bad batch maybe - or just a generic X58 problem?

Already been down the CPU VCore voltage. I lowered it to 1.1 and it seemed quite stable, but it made the temp increase so I put it back to stock. I might lower it again and leave it for a day or two to see what happens.

Dave76 said:

There is something wrong when you lower the VCore to 1.1v and get higher temps.
Motherboard or PSU, if the guy at the shop has a PSU you can test it with you would have your answer.

Wouldn't be a good thing if you bought a new motherboard and had the same problem.

I take your point.

I have 5 PCs with the same mobo, CPU, PSU, RAM and graphics card. I could borrow any combination from any of the PCs. Except, all 5 PCs exhibit exactly the same symptoms. Not one will idle under 45 degrees.

Never considered PSU.. I have a couple of PCs with a different brand and rating PSU.. Different everything, but I can pull them apart and try a few things.

They are all in different locations in the house, including lounge and rumpus room (Bigger open spaces).

I was looking at the sabertooth X58. It has USB 3 and SATA 3, which will sort of future-proof the PCs a little if I went that way.. After testing a single one of course..

Keep in mind, I'm using a 920, not a 980X as in this review...

ASUS TUF Sabertooth X58 review