Good cooler for I7-920 OC

Golden said:

Have you considered Thermaltake?

Thermaltake Australia & New Zealand - Chassis

Briefly.

I ended up getting an Antec 900 2. Building the system was painful because it hasn't really got fantastic cable management routes, and since the PSU is at the bottom of the case the 8 pin power cable to the mobo was too short, so I had to route it over the GPU until I can get an extension cable.

The side has a bracket for a 120mm fan, and only a 120mm. However, if you have an after market cooler, you can't use the side fan - no space.

It also only has 3 5.25" bays - so I had to lose the creative audio thingy. DOesn't matter, didn't use it anyway.

All up, this case has 5 x 120mm fans and 1 x 140mm fan.

The case fans use the old PATA connectors - dumb in my opinion. Can't connect them to the motherboard so can't monitor their speeds.

There are a couple of switches on the back for fan speeds. I have then all set to full. Even at full speeds, the noise is a little better than the old case I had.

The most important thing though is the temp... It seems to have lowered it.

IIRC, my CPU was typically 20c - 22c above ambient room temperature. Which is currently 26c

So, in the old case, I would have expected a temp of 46 - 48c.

In the new case it is 43c. Disappointing to say the least, but better than it was.

I will try to prove the CPU delta (diff between ambient and CPU), tonight as I try to cool the room.

I'm still running vcore at 1.1000. Everything else it still stock.

I couldn't get the new sabertooth mobo.

Tanya

Dave76 said:

Thanks for letting us know the progress, too bad the temp wasn't a bit lower.

Keep us informed on the next step.

Next step? The only part of my computer that now has not been replaced is the motherboard, and generally people are saying that is unlikely to be the problem.

The new case got me a 3 degree drop in temps, not enough to do any real overclocking.

I am still where I was two weeks ago, except several hundreds of dollars poorer.

At the risk of being a pain, I am still looking for answers

Tanya

Golden said:

Watercooling perhaps? It seems a bit extreme, but what else.............I've run out of ideas

me too.

y'know what really irks me is that I've just upgraded the cases of three of the 5 systems, all identical in every way, all in the same size and shape room, with the same desks. There is nothing different about the environments or computers.

And they all have different temps. It's bizaare. Mine runs at 15 above ambient, another at 17 above ambient, and the other at 25 above ambient.

There has got to be some logical explanation for the wild temps.

Watercooling might or might not work. I didn't get the best case for watercooling.

In any case - I'm feeling it is better to identify the cause of the problem, rather than trying to keep putting bandaids on it.

I'm completely baffled.

Dave76 said:

Just did some more reading on i7-920 core temps, here are a couple of things others have done to get cooler temps.

Thanks for sticking with this thread.

Dave76 said:

What is the speed and voltage of your RAM?

Can't remember if you've told us already but, what's the QPI/VTT set at?
This is the memory controller that is integrated in the CPU.

Are the C-states enabled in your BIOS?

Is the ACPI enabled?

Try turning the Hyperthreading off to see if the temps go down.

To answer those questions I took some pics of my bios settings. I hope they are readable.

I had read about these in the early days of trying to solve my temp problems. Originally I didn't have the C-States enabled, but that was one of the first things I tried. The rest are all at stock settings, except vcore which I set to 1.10000v a few days ago.

Is the multi-threading option for hyper threading?

I could only find the suspend option for ACPI mentioned in the bios, and nothing else related to ACPI. Since WIndows 7 doesn't use a boot.ini there is no ACPI=ON.

Tanya

Tanyam said:

In the new case it is 43c. Disappointing to say the least, but better than it was.

Honestly there's nothing wrong with those temps on an i7-920. To be quite honest they are average.

You can get caught up in chasing other people's temps, and spending unnecessary amounts of money – and in the end, when you add up all the time and money - just to get that processor in the low to mid thirties you’re going to wonder if it was worth it.

I have an i7-950 that's idling around 42c degrees. My i7-930 idled around the same temps stock, and I have an aftermarket cooler!!!

Temps depend and a few factors – Cooler/Fan, case, RAM, Processor, ambient temps, time of year, location of case, ventilation - you get the point.

I stopped paying attention to the "your temps seems high" a long time ago once I understood the above factors.

Again, there's nothing wrong with those temps - other than bragging rights!

My two cents.