Need some additional ideas before I throw in the towel

Cooling Processors quietly

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jerryk
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Need some additional ideas before I throw in the towel

Post by jerryk » Wed Mar 19, 2003 10:37 pm

HI,

Every since I got my P4 (2.4Ghz) I have been battling with sound versus heat issues.

I currently have a SLK-900U heat sync with a Stealth 92 mm fan, and 2 Stealth 80 mm exhaust fans. However, to get the keep the temps under 60 C running CPU burn I have to run the fans at some pretty high levels. At these levels the system is far too noisy. Before I give up and try water cooling can someone give me some alternatives.

Thanks,

Jerry

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Post by ez2remember » Wed Mar 19, 2003 11:14 pm

60oC seems pretty high for such a good HS with a P4. :shock:

What thermal paste are you using?
What is ambient temps like?

Give us more detail of your setup, other heat generators like graphics etc.

jerryk
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Post by jerryk » Wed Mar 19, 2003 11:34 pm

ez2remember wrote:60oC seems pretty high for such a good HS with a P4. :shock:

What thermal paste are you using?
What is ambient temps like?

Give us more detail of your setup, other heat generators like graphics etc.
I am using Silver 3 as a paste. The only other thing on the system is one Barracuda IV 80 GB drive, and a nvidia GeForce 5 MX 44 video card.

The temps are actually a little worse, I pushed it well over 65 C running CPU Burn in Normal mode for 5 minutes.

jerry

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Post by Boomerang Rapido » Thu Mar 20, 2003 12:04 am

65 C sounds extremely high for a 2.4 GHz!

- What is your CPU's idle temperature?

- What is your motherboard temperature?

- What is your room temperature?

- Also if you just recently installed the new heatsink, try and remount it, and make sure it is making proper contact with the CPU.

- Do you have any temperature readings with a stock heatsink?

- Under load, is your system still stable despite the high temperatures?

- What motherboard do you have?

Some boards are known give very high temperature readings. I just returned an Asus P4PE myself because it was giving false temperature readings (about 15-18 degrees C too high).

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Post by efcoins » Thu Mar 20, 2003 1:02 am

Do you have any input fans, or only exausts

jerryk
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Post by jerryk » Thu Mar 20, 2003 6:32 am

Boomerang Rapido wrote:65 C sounds extremely high for a 2.4 GHz!

- What is your CPU's idle temperature?

- What is your motherboard temperature?

- What is your room temperature?

- Also if you just recently installed the new heatsink, try and remount it, and make sure it is making proper contact with the CPU.

- Do you have any temperature readings with a stock heatsink?

- Under load, is your system still stable despite the high temperatures?

- What motherboard do you have?

Some boards are known give very high temperature readings. I just returned an Asus P4PE myself because it was giving false temperature readings (about 15-18 degrees C too high).
I start with the last question first. At first I thought the motherboard might be lying to me, but I checked it by putting a thermocouple onto the base of the heat sink. The motherboard and heat sink agree to within +/- 1 C.

The CPU idles at around 32C.

The mother board is a ECS P4VXASD2+. 512 MBytes of DDR 2700 memory.

The system temps report about 32-33 C

The power supply temp is around 34 C

Room temp is 22C

There are only exhaust fans. The case is very open.

This is the second heat sync on this system, the Volcano go hotter even faster.

Please note with this set up I can get the temps to stay in the 40-45 C range running CPUBurn if I set the Fanmates to wide open. But, at this setting the system is unacceptably loud.

These high numbers are achived with the Fanmates set to slightly above their lowest setting.

Most of the things I do on the system never push the temps event close to the 60C mark. But, I have seen the KDE (this is a Linux system) screen saver cause high temps. This is pretty intense application that generates and displays Madelbrot (sp?) pattern sets.

jerry

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Post by ez2remember » Thu Mar 20, 2003 6:47 am

Hmm, I really wonder what is causing your CPU to heat up that rapidly using CPU Burn. Have you checked the vCore for your processor, it may be providing too much voltage.

You could try undervolting with or without underclocking (more effective with underclocking), this would bring down temps a lot. :D

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Post by efcoins » Thu Mar 20, 2003 6:47 am

There are only exhaust fans. The case is very open.


If your case side is removed then you just need a CPU fan, otherwise you need the input and exaust fans to balance. Is one of the exausts in the PSU ?
2 or 3 exausts with no inputs will always give high temps,

Try turning one of the exausts into an input (may need repositioning first), or just add 1 or 2 extra input fans.

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Post by fancontrol » Thu Mar 20, 2003 7:34 am

As much as I hate to toot my own horn, this sounds like a job for closed-loop fan controls! Check out my web link below.

It won't fix the high temps, the other suggestions will help that I'm sure, but it will keep the system quiet at idle and still protect the system as it heats up.

Good luck, let us know how it goes.

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Post by jerryk » Thu Mar 20, 2003 7:58 am

fancontrol wrote:As much as I hate to toot my own horn, this sounds like a job for closed-loop fan controls! Check out my web link below.

It won't fix the high temps, the other suggestions will help that I'm sure, but it will keep the system quiet at idle and still protect the system as it heats up.

Good luck, let us know how it goes.
But, won't it get a lot noiser also under load. That is the issue I have now. With the fans turned up a bit, the system will stay cool under load, but the noise increases as the MB speeds up the fan. (The CPU fan is a 3 wire 92 mm Stealth). The increase in noise under load is not acceptable.

jerry

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Post by jerryk » Thu Mar 20, 2003 8:00 am

efcoins wrote:There are only exhaust fans. The case is very open.


If your case side is removed then you just need a CPU fan, otherwise you need the input and exaust fans to balance. Is one of the exausts in the PSU ?
2 or 3 exhausts with no inputs will always give high temps,

Try turning one of the exhausts into an input (may need repositioning first), or just add 1 or 2 extra input fans.
I can give that a try. I have a 3rd fans set up as input, but it made too much noise so I disconnected it

My other thought is that the graphics card is running hot (50C) when measured at the heat sink.

jerry

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Post by Boomerang Rapido » Thu Mar 20, 2003 10:51 am

To be perfectly honest, I doubt that an intake fan will do much, but you should at least try it... it can't hurt.

But I must say I have no idea what would cause your CPU to get that hot under load. I have the 2.4 GHz as well and with a Alpha 8942 HS and a 19db pabst fan I never go over 45 degrees under load.

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Post by jerryk » Thu Mar 20, 2003 11:33 am

Boomerang Rapido wrote:To be perfectly honest, I doubt that an intake fan will do much, but you should at least try it... it can't hurt.

But I must say I have no idea what would cause your CPU to get that hot under load. I have the 2.4 GHz as well and with a Alpha 8942 HS and a 19db pabst fan I never go over 45 degrees under load.
That is very interesting. By under load do you mean running something like CPUBurn in normal or high priority? Or do you mean doing "real" work?

Also, can you hear the fans in your system? Mine are nearly silent. I hear the seagate Baracudda IV as much as I do the fans. Except when I start doing something heavy the CPU fan stars to speed up.

herrt

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Post by Boomerang Rapido » Thu Mar 20, 2003 11:58 am

Yes by 'load' I mean running CPU burn. When doing regular stuff (which in my case means games :) ) i'm usually on 38 degrees right after I exit the game.

As for my fans, the fan noise is audible, but still very quiet. To be honest I think the biggest sinner in my system is my GF4 ti4200.

I have the pabst fan cooling the CPU HS running at full reps constantly.

On top of that I have two 80mm exhaust fans in the back of the case, running at 5 volts. Noise level is unchanged with or without them running.

ow PS: No intake fans!

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Post by fancontrol » Thu Mar 20, 2003 12:24 pm

jerryk wrote:But, won't it get a lot noiser also under load.
Certainly. Whether or not it's "a lot" depends on your configuration. The board does nothing to improve cooling, it simply makes sure you're not suffering from noise due to excessive cooling.

There are some good points in this thread about how often one realistically loads their system up all the way. For me it is rare. That's what got me on this kick in the first place.

Good point.

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Post by jerryk » Thu Mar 20, 2003 12:25 pm

Boomerang Rapido wrote:Yes by 'load' I mean running CPU burn. I have the pabst fan cooling the CPU HS running at full reps constantly.

ow PS: No intake fans!
By full reps do you mean it is running at 12 volts?

I can achive the same performance you do running above 9 volts or so, but the noise to to great. Perhaps I need to replace the Stealth 92 mm with something else?

jerry

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Post by powergyoza » Thu Mar 20, 2003 12:28 pm

Boomerang Rapido wrote:But I must say I have no idea what would cause your CPU to get that hot under load. I have the 2.4 GHz as well and with a Alpha 8942 HS and a 19db pabst fan I never go over 45 degrees under load.
Your difference in temp might be due to different fan speeds. Are you running your papst @ 12 volts or less?

Stealth 92mm have been mentioned to be terrible for bearing & electronic noise. You might need to replace those.

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Post by Boomerang Rapido » Thu Mar 20, 2003 12:47 pm

To answer you both, yes I'm running the pabst fan at 12 volts. Dropping the voltage would make no sense anyway since my GF4 is drowning it out anyways.... man I need to find another cooling solution or a passively cooled graphics card :)

Jerry... guess I hadn't really caught on there. It hadn't dawned on me that you were running your fans at lower voltage :oops:.

But you might wanna look into some different fans. You can't always trust the specs. My case fans (came with my thermaltake case) are rated at 21 db, but if I run them at 12 volts the noise is just horrible.

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Post by jerryk » Thu Mar 20, 2003 1:17 pm

Stealth 92mm have been mentioned to be terrible for bearing & electronic noise. You might need to replace those.
Do you have any suggestions for quiet at higher speed 92 mm fans?

While I can use an 80 mm fan with the SLK-900U heatsink, I like the idea of using the bigger fan since can potentially cool something beyond the CPU.

jerry
[/quote]

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Post by jerryk » Thu Mar 20, 2003 6:10 pm

Aha!

I think I finally figured out what is going on. A quick read of the specs for the Vantec SF9225L fan reviels some interesting numbers. One, the fan is pretty quite (20db), and second the fan does not move a lot of air (28 CFM) This is pretty wimply compared to some of the other 92 mm fans. And, most importantly, this is a 12 V. So by setting the FanMate very low I was reducing the max airflow to a very low and inadaquate amount. Thus the system would heat up when the voltage was low and CPU load high.

I also suspect that having the fan speed line connected to the CPU fan and going through a fan mate causes some issue. Maybe someone can tell me if this is true, but since I have the speedmate connected to the regular CPU fan connector on the MB that the voltage was already reduced based on load. So putting the fan mate on this line may be redundant if not dangerous because of the low volatages.

Also, as it turns out, setting the voltage way down was not necessary. The Vantec 92 fan is quiet. I set it to 10-11 volts and the things is still pretty quiet. And when running CPUBurn, even on high priority, the system never got over 45C. In fact, it when up to 45C, and as the fan sped up the temps dropped to 43C and stayed there for 20 minutes. However, the system was noisy.

After some investigation it appears the the noise is mostly coming from the Power Supply fans. Apparently, even though the box on the Enermax ATX-FCA says manual control, the manual control only dampens the automatic fans control. The PSU fans still speed up when the system is placed under load and demands more power. When the system idles, these fans cut way back.

So at this point, I have the 92 mm Stealth on the heatsink set to 11 volts. The 2 case fans are around 5 volts, and the PSU speed control is on the lowest setting (1500 RPM according to the box). The system seems pretty quiet, provided I do not run CPU burn of other tests. However, when I do run these system gets noisy as the fans in the PSU and CPU spin up, but it stays cool.

Jerry

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Post by morganw » Fri Mar 21, 2003 4:34 pm

I see you're using an SLK900. Which way are your fins oriented? Up/down or left/right?

I ask because my AMD OEM cooler was left/right & also only 60mm square, so the air flowing out had plenty of chance to reach the case fan.

The SLK900 goes up/down on my GA-7VTXE motherboard & it's so big that the upper end is pretty near the power supply.

With the fan blowing in on the heatsink, the warmed air seemed to be going into the power supply (a Powerman/Fortron Source/Sparkle with Noise Killer thermistor-controlled fan), making it run the fan faster/louder.

I turned the fan around & the power supply fan is back to nearly inaudible.

Before

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After

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jerryk
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Post by jerryk » Fri Mar 21, 2003 6:40 pm

morganw wrote:I see you're using an SLK900. Which way are your fins oriented? Up/down or left/right?

With the fan blowing in on the heatsink, the warmed air seemed to be going into the power supply (a Powerman/Fortron Source/Sparkle with Noise Killer thermistor-controlled fan), making it run the fan faster/louder.

I turned the fan around & the power supply fan is back to nearly inaudible.
So your heatsink fan is pulling air from under the heat sink. Interesting. My heat sink is oriented up/down and the fan on the heatsink blows down. My power supply has two fans, a 80 mm and a 92 mm. The fan facing into to the case is pulling air into the PSU. The one outside is pushing it out. The PSU fan is about 1 inch above the fan for the heat sink. Therefore, I think the PSU and heat sink fan are benifiting from the flow of air up and through the PSU.

jerry

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