Troubleshooting Essentials

[Gav]

Originally Posted by sswilson

Did you have a chance to check it out?

I'm planning on playing with different distros over the christmas holidays so I'll probably be posting questions in the linux thread.

Not yet. I'm busy messing around with Vista at the moment, trying to make it act/look more like XP. :mad: Hopefully i'll get a chance to look at it next week.

[Babrbarossa]

Why does core temp consistently read 4 to 8 degrees lower than both speedafan and nvidia system monitor? These both say it idles at 44, and peaks at 56-- are these temps too high?

[Gav]

Originally Posted by Babrbarossa

Why does core temp consistently read 4 to 8 degrees lower than both speedafan and nvidia system monitor? These both say it idles at 44, and peaks at 56-- are these temps too high?

Are you referring to the reading you are getting in the BIOS?

Honestly, these programs and the BIOS readings are notorious for often being inaccurate. I don't really know what else to tell you but 56c at full load isn't to bad.

[sswilson]

Core temp and cpu temp are normally two different temps.

In my speedfan setup I've got both cpu temp & core temp. (If memory serves me correctly the actual core temp reading is something relatively new that comes directly from the cpu as opposed to cpu temp which I believe is taken off of the mobo)

For my setup core temp typically lags cpu temp by 3 or 4 deg c.

[Babrbarossa]

OK- That explains it. I do feel like I should be having lower idle temps though, and I find it strange how my temperatures don't seem to change at all regardless of how much current I'm running through. I did get in my OCZ ultra 5+ compund today so I am reading up on how to reseat the heatsink, but I'm a little worried about not doing it right.

-thanks!

[sswilson]

Are you wondering about how to use the TIM or how to secure the heatsink?

If you're asking about the tim.... two schools of thought out there.....

Most popular is to use a smallish (grain of rice size) dab in the middle of the HSF and let the heatsink do the job of spreading it around.

Second method (what I use) is to use about the same amount, but then to spread it over the HSF yourself using a flat surface like a credit card. (I just use a plastic sandwich bag over my finger and spread it around as thin as possible).

[Gav]

I use pretty much the same method as sswilson.

I put an extremely small amount on the heatsink and work it in with some plastic wrap on my finger (you should still be able to see the metal of the heatsink through the thermal grease).

Once it looks like i've filled in all the imperfections/tooling marks I put another small amount on top of the CPU and spread it out with a credit card. I usually spread it out until I can almost see the heat spreader, basically it's a micro thin layer.

Then make sure you place your heatsink on CPU squarely and clamp it down and you're good to go.

I honestly don't normally go through this much trouble for a normal build, but if i'm going to overclock then I will.:cool:

[Babrbarossa]

I reset the heatsink and while I'm not sure I did a great job, I have seen about 2 degrees improvement, and may see more over the next 100 or so hours. I'm glad I did it because when I took it off there was compound oozing down the sides of the cpu-- there was about four times too much goop on there.

[Babrbarossa]

I downloaded the Intel thermal analysis tool today and ran it-- it includes a cpu stressor for both cores-- not sure whether it can do four cores-- This tool seems to be able to stress the cpu cores much better than one or two copies of orthos, judging by the tempertures that go mugh higher under the intel stress test. My temperatures at core 0 were reaching 64 degrees after only a few minutes at 100% workload. When using two copies of orthos, they didn't go past 53. Quite a difference, and a little bit scary for my overclock. I wonder if any demanding applications that I would be running day-to-day would stress it this much?

[Babrbarossa]

OK-- I just found one person on one forum that said not to go over 80% workload on both cores as even orthos can't stress the chip beyond this-- that brings down the max temp signiificantly. I also found a couple of posts that said that core temps tend to be reading higher on the newer multi-core chips because of the more accurate internal sensors and that it's nothing to be alarmed about to see temperatures creeping beyong the 60 mark-- anyone have any comment on this?