My Thermalright SLK-900(A) with 2500+ Barton

Cooling Processors quietly

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exxowire
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My Thermalright SLK-900(A) with 2500+ Barton

Post by exxowire » Thu Mar 18, 2004 8:46 pm

I have a AMD 2500+ Barton AQXEA and use a Thermalright SLK-900(A) heatsink, Artic Silver 5 thermal paste, and a Panaflo fan.

The temp reading on my CPUIdle software is 41-42. Is it normal ? Does anyone experience any lower temp than mine ?.

Does anyone have any idea how to lower the temperature ? Do I need a Water cooling block from Zalman ?

I manage to torture test with Prime 95 and it is stable. I also overclocked it up to 2332.5 MHz from the bios. I install my CPU to an Abit NF7-S, Seasonic Tornado 400w and a antec P160 case.

sthayashi
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Post by sthayashi » Thu Mar 18, 2004 9:08 pm

Yes, this is normal. No, I don't have any experience with temperatures lower than yours. I think few people on this forum do.

If you want to lower your temperature BELOW 41-42C, you'll probably want to consider watercooling. I have no idea whether you NEED the watercooling block from Zalman or not. Another possibility for lowering the temperature is to undervolt. There is a lot of information on undervolting in these forums if you look around.

But I see no reason for you to try and lower your temperatures further since everything is working great and you have great temperatures to begin with.

luminous
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Post by luminous » Fri Mar 19, 2004 4:10 am

I would say that your temps are really good. I cannot see any reason why you would want to lower them further.

The temps of your machine at full load are more relevant than when idle. You need to ensure you have sufficient cooling under worst case scenarios. I cannot see that you will have a problem. Try running a CPU and GPU intensive test. Eg Prime and 3D Mark. If you manage to keep temps below 55C you are doing really well with your setup.

exxowire
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Post by exxowire » Fri Mar 19, 2004 6:01 am

My thanks to Luminous and sthayashi,

Luminous: I see that you are using 2 80mm case fans @ 7V. Does the fan create noise ? I notice some member suggested 5V for the case fans. Some even use Zalman Fan mate to control the rpm speed. For your Sapphire 9600, which Zalman heatpipe do you use?.

patvan
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Re: My Thermalright SLK-900(A) with 2500+ Barton

Post by patvan » Fri Mar 19, 2004 1:02 pm

exxowire wrote:I have a AMD 2500+ Barton AQXEA and use a Thermalright SLK-900(A) heatsink, Artic Silver 5 thermal paste, and a Panaflo fan.

The temp reading on my CPUIdle software is 41-42. Is it normal ? Does anyone experience any lower temp than mine ?.

Does anyone have any idea how to lower the temperature ? Do I need a Water cooling block from Zalman ?

I manage to torture test with Prime 95 and it is stable. I also overclocked it up to 2332.5 MHz from the bios. I install my CPU to an Abit NF7-S, Seasonic Tornado 400w and a antec P160 case.
I'm getting 34-36°C idle (as reported by the mobo) on a XP2500+ right now, here's my setup:

SLQ3700BQE, stock 80mm fan, ThermalTake SilentBoost cooler with generic silver paste. MSI K7N2-L mobo

One thing that really brings down the temp is the "Idle CPU disconnect" feature of the nForce2 chipset. When I activate it, the CPU temp drops ~5°C; without it, I hover at around 40°C.

Seeing as the rest of my gear is pretty unremarkable, I'd look for that option in your BIOS.

CAVEAT: the CPU disconnect feature on my mobo model really interferes with the on-board sound card. When disconnect is activated, a constant hi-frequency background whine can be heard in the line-out's background (ie speakers, headphones, etc). Since my machine is a server, I don't use the sound most of the time; when playing games, the CPU isn't idle anyways, so the whine disappears.

CAVEAT 2: depending on your motherboard's make, the CPU Idle disconnect function might not be setable in the BIOS. In that case, you'll have to find a program that allows to set it. Under Linux (what I'm using), you can use athcool to toggle the function off and on.

Vegita
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Re: My Thermalright SLK-900(A) with 2500+ Barton

Post by Vegita » Mon Mar 22, 2004 10:07 pm

patvan wrote: One thing that really brings down the temp is the "Idle CPU disconnect" feature of the nForce2 chipset. When I activate it, the CPU temp drops ~5°C; without it, I hover at around 40°C.

Seeing as the rest of my gear is pretty unremarkable, I'd look for that option in your BIOS.

CAVEAT: the CPU disconnect feature on my mobo model really interferes with the on-board sound card. When disconnect is activated, a constant hi-frequency background whine can be heard in the line-out's background (ie speakers, headphones, etc). Since my machine is a server, I don't use the sound most of the time; when playing games, the CPU isn't idle anyways, so the whine disappears.

CAVEAT 2: depending on your motherboard's make, the CPU Idle disconnect function might not be setable in the BIOS. In that case, you'll have to find a program that allows to set it. Under Linux (what I'm using), you can use athcool to toggle the function off and on.
I use CpuIdle for this.. and it's awesome. My Barton 2600+ @ 2700+ idles around 37°C (w/ mobo @ 38°C)! Without it, it idles around 48°C. Also note that since the power consumption of the CPU is cut way down, my PSU slows wayyyy down. Quiet. :D Also note, CpuIdle and similiar utilities don't help at all during load.

vortex222
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Post by vortex222 » Mon Mar 29, 2004 2:37 am

i notice that hum as well, however, the hum stops when i run Folding@Home :D

k3nmastel2
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Post by k3nmastel2 » Fri Apr 02, 2004 11:18 am

i get 34 to 35 when i'm runnin it full .. i idle at around 30 to 31 degrees and i have a dfi nfii ultra with a slk 900a with arctic silver 5 thermal paste along with a panaflo fan .. i havnt even set the cpuidle thing yet .. mayb too much thermal paste? or bad air flow .. i have 2 intakes and 2 exhaust

Rusty075
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Post by Rusty075 » Fri Apr 02, 2004 12:09 pm

Guys, at some point you have to move beyond the obsession with temps.

It doesn't matter what temp your CPU is, at idle or load, as long as it's below the damage threshold (which is 90°!) and you're stable, your cooling is fine.

Run CPUBurn. If your temps level off at 70° or below, and it doesn't crash, stop worrying. Then run Prime95 to test for stability. (even if prime95 fails, 99% of the time its not the temp's fault)

My M-Barton 2500 idles at 42° and max's out at 58°. And that's fine with me. :lol:

wumpus
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Post by wumpus » Fri Apr 02, 2004 1:01 pm

Agree with Rusty.

I have a number of PCs that max out at 70c. That's the highest REAL WORLD load temp I am comfortable with, and it's totally safe and within manufacturer defined specs for the CPU.

wumpus
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Post by wumpus » Fri Apr 02, 2004 1:05 pm

Also note, CpuIdle and similiar utilities don't help at all during load.
Not true-- exactly the OPPOSITE of my experience. I find CpuIdle to work best UNDER LOAD (caveat: nForce2, so no disconnect from bus).

That's because CpuIdle runs a normal priority thread which executes HLT and competes for time with whatever else you are running that is taking CPU time.

That special thread will get execution time periodically and issue HLT, which has no meaningful effect on performance, but certainly causes the CPU to cool down more than it would in a pure load scenario.

Remember, the OS-provided idle thread executes HLT but it only executes when the machine is totally idle. In a 100% load scenario there is no idle state-- therefore having another normal thread doing basically the same thing as the idle thread is a good idea in some situations.

Jan Kivar
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Post by Jan Kivar » Sat Apr 03, 2004 12:31 am

wumpus wrote:That special thread will get execution time periodically and issue HLT, which has no meaningful effect on performance, but certainly causes the CPU to cool down more than it would in a pure load scenario.
IIRC CPUIdle would automatically disable itself whenever the processor had 100% load in order to prevent the HLT being executed. IIRC there was an option to enable/disable this.

The automatic disabling didn't work very well; there was at least one game which would jerk every second as CPUIdle "kicked in".

BTW, this was with Windows 98SE...

Cheers,

Jan

silvervarg
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Post by silvervarg » Sun Apr 04, 2004 2:17 am

If you let CPU idle run at same priority as your other threads and the programs you run want to have more CPU cycles than you can provide, then the CPU idle steals a fair amount of shares from the other processes that are running.
Assuming you run 5 processes and one of them is CPU idle, then you only get 80% usefull CPU power. So instead of running like this you could underclock by 20% and be able to undervolt some more and don't run CPUidle.
I think this approach only has benefits over CPUidle except that it might take a while to find what settings are optimal.

On the other hand to let the OS (or CPUidle if your have a real crappy OS) execute HLT instructions when you don't need the CPU power is a good idea. By doing this you can lower temps so your temp controlled fans can spin down, giving you a nice low noise level during most of your work.

Michael_qrt
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Post by Michael_qrt » Mon Apr 05, 2004 4:47 am

This is all well and good, but lets face some facts here. There is no reason at all why your machine should ever be idle.

http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=10621

Visit the link above and the rest of the folding forum to see why it is both fun and beneficial to science and medicine for you to donate your spare cpu cycles to the folding@home project. As a team SPCR folding@home is a team on the move up the rankings and the larger we become the more exposure this website and quiet computing in general will get from other folding users.

And just to be kind of relevant to the rest of the discussion, I agree with Rusty on the issue of acceptable temps. Well I maybe like to be at a max of 65C while running CPU burn. However I don't see why I would have to settle for those sort of temps unless I was overclocking anyway. At the moment easily the loudest thing in my system is my spinpoint HD and I never see more than ~50C load even with ~30C ambient temps on my stock speed 2500+. If I overclock to 3200 speeds my chip needs 1.85V (I know, I know) and the temps rise to about 65C with CPU burn, without changing the fans speeds at all.

Vegita
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Post by Vegita » Tue Apr 06, 2004 1:49 am

wumpus wrote:
Also note, CpuIdle and similiar utilities don't help at all during load.
Not true-- exactly the OPPOSITE of my experience. I find CpuIdle to work best UNDER LOAD (caveat: nForce2, so no disconnect from bus).

That's because CpuIdle runs a normal priority thread which executes HLT and competes for time with whatever else you are running that is taking CPU time.

That special thread will get execution time periodically and issue HLT, which has no meaningful effect on performance, but certainly causes the CPU to cool down more than it would in a pure load scenario.

Remember, the OS-provided idle thread executes HLT but it only executes when the machine is totally idle. In a 100% load scenario there is no idle state-- therefore having another normal thread doing basically the same thing as the idle thread is a good idea in some situations.
You can set CPUIdle to as (or same time) as the System Idle Process. The option is called "OS Controlled Idling".

When CPUIdle is set in this mode, Task Manager reports the actual CPU usage (instead of constant CPU usage), and so I would presume that CPUIdle has no effect at all on CPU load.

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