[SOLVED] I've got some thermal concerns ...

Originally Posted by Dan

BTW, are you using your SSD for the OS base or data storage?

Just O/S ..

[stevea]

Just a side note. Measuring temps with your finger is fun, but you can get a really nice laser aimed digital infrared thermometer these days for as little as $25. Not a specific recommendation, but this is an example,
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...9SIA0U008R3142

Then you can measure spot temperatures very quickly and put together a nice mental image of how your system temps vary.

This is one of those great toys that no geek should live without. Useful in the kitchen, at the grill, under the hood (car or lab), when guesstimating home/wall insulation and thermal 'leaks' and when toying with a hot computer system. It wont replace the infrared imaging binoculars in the bedroom, but still a great buy.

[Dan]

Well, the big brown truck came today, and with it came a new cooling solution, which is currently installed and running. It would be safe to say things are a bit more tolerable. At this moment I am simultaneously running:

• Handbrake
• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• Nautilus
• Terminals (2)
• Gkrellm
• GIMP
• Gthumb

$ sensors -f |grep temp*
k10temp-pci-00c3
temp1:       +115.7°F  (high = +158.0°F)
temp1:       +100.4°F  (low  = +260.6°F, high = +260.6°F)  sensor = thermistor
temp2:       +109.4°F  (low  = +260.6°F, high = +140.0°F)  sensor = thermal diode
temp3:       +107.6°F  (low  = +260.6°F, high = +260.6°F)  sensor = thermistor

That's 20~30F knocked off the top, and I'm running far more than I would have even considered before. ghb (Handbrake) is actively in the process of ripping a DVD, and has been for the last twelve minutes.

Methinks I'd call that a success of sorts. If nothing else, it's a powerful condemnation of the factory cooling solution provided with the chip.

Before:



After:


That being said, it's worth noting that the thermal medium (paste) that had been provided with the OEM cooler, had dried out to a bone dry flakey layer of complete dysfunction.

[Dan]

For the sake of completeness, and as encouragement to any viewers/readers who may find it helpful ...

Detail views:

Correctly seated heatsink - left side.



Correctly seated heatsink - corner view.



Correctly seated heatsink - right view.



Thermal compound view 1



Thermal compound view 2



Backplate detail



Memory/fan interference (RAM modules with tall heatsinks would present a problem here.)



Before I closed the patient and re-booted, I also installed a second fan in push-pull configuration on the heatsink. It's not that loud, and better safe than sorry. Maybe when winter comes I'll take the second one off, but not now.

[Dan]

*Sigh!*

There just ain't no way to win ...

It's drop-dead gorgeous here this morning. The mercury is at a very comfortable 63F outside, so I pulled the plug on the AC unit, opened the house up this morning and after checking the nightly spambot attack specs, I fetched a slice of cantaloupe, a slice of bacon, and a fresh cup of coffee (A true breakfast of the gods, by the way.) and headed out onto the porch to watch the morning romp between a neighborhood pit bull and the chihuahua from two doors down engage their morning romp in the park with the wild joyous abandon that only two such fun loving dogs could display -- much to the chagrin of the resident romping squirrels. The cats had already said good morning to the pups, and were content to lay in a haphazard scattering in the tall grass of the yard, which I really should mow sometime today.

All was as it should be ... until I heard a shrill buzzing coming from the office. Couldn't be the alarm clock. That quit displaying the time several days ago, and after revival efforts failed, its useable organs were harvested, and what remained was buried in the trashcan currently sitting on the curb waiting for the trash truck. Couldn't be the cell phone. That is in the kitchen hooked up to charger getting a load of electronic breakfast itself. Couldn't be the radio. Ain't turned that on in two days. Weekend programming is wall-to-wall info-mercials for various snake-oil colon medications, laughable financial products and How-to-speak-miracle-piglatin in three easy lessons -- so I don't listen during the weekends. <....>

That only leaves one other piece of electronic junk still running in there. My desktop computer!

So I hauled my sorry rump in here, and sure enough ... I've got a motherboard alarm buzzing away. I hit the chair, and my hand was almost to the power button when I caught sight of this ...

<....>

The room temperature was down to 68F, and the CPU had gotten a wee bit chilly ... and shut off it's own fan. And the motherboard, being the overly cautious critter that it is, (and that I want it to be.) was (and still is) pitching a fit about it. <....>


<....>


There just ain't no way to win, I tell ya!


<....>

[PabloTwo]

Dan, it's been awhile now since I was running an AMD cpu (up until the mb died on me and was replaced with a much newer Intel cpu mb). But I recall some time back, in cooler weather, the cpu fan would fail to start up, and the BIOS would print a message to the screen alerting me to the fact the cpu fan was @ 0 rpms, and thus would halt the rest of the post/boot process.

I figured out that, at the time, I was running both AMD's "Cool n Quiet" and "Q-fan" enabled in the BIOS. When I disabled "Q-fan" (Quiet Fan), the problem went away. Problem was, with both enabled, the voltage to the cpu fan was lowered to such a point that it wasn't enough to even drive the fan motor.

Check your BIOS, and see what's going on there.

[Dan]

That's pretty much exactly what's going on here. Once I blocked off the side panel, which gave the in-box air a chance to warm up a little, the fan started ticking over above 400rpm, and both the audible and Gkrellm visual alarms silenced.

Truth be told, I had the warnings set due to the limitations of the old cooler. If the fan on it stopped ... ugly things were soon bound to happen. This new beast is a horse from a different kettle of fish. I really don't mind if the fan on this new cooler feathers and shuts down to basic windmilling. Given its basic effectiveness, I've got a little more time to scram the beast before things go critical. The rub lies in the fact I still had the CPU fan alarm set to get my attention if the rpms dropped to nil, and I really didn't want to shut down, reset the BIOS warning limits, and re-boot this morning. <....>

So, although the buzzer was a surprise and an annoyance ... I'll gladly live with the fact that some problems are a bit less critical than others. <....>

Besides ... now that the office/outside temps are up to 72F ... everything is chugging along pretty much as it should.

[stevea]

Nevermind - missed a page.

[AndrewSerk]

The future of cooling?

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/a...l-oil-cooling/

[Bazu135]

Originally Posted by AndrewSerk

The future of cooling?

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/a...l-oil-cooling/

Probably won't see it in Dan's house any time soon

[AndrewSerk]

True!

It sure would be nice to put a liquid chiller outside and not have to deal with the heat in the building again.

We had a thread here a few years ago on the subject of submersion cooling. I thought about using some old hardware and a fish tank for entertainment purposes but never got around to it.

Maybe the tech will be ready in time for my next upgrade.

[Dan]

Seems like weight could rapidly become an issue that way. <....> It would, however, eliminate the need for regularly blowing the dust out of the box.

[DBelton]

well, I did notice from your pictures above, that you have a motherboard that has "Ultra Durable" stamped on it.

Was that the "clincher" in you deciding to purchase that motherboard, or was it just coincidence?

[Dan]

Yeah. Given my general run of luck with hardware, and past experience with a half dozen BioStar, MSI, etc. mid-level fail-boards, I shot a little higher on the price/quality scale this time around.

So far, the only issue I've had with this one is directly traceable and attributable to fedora's vunderbork NIC driver updates.

<....>