Heatwave!

So, it's been rather hot in London of late; it reached 27.5°C in our lounge on Sunday, according to our central heating's thermostat!

I was keen to see what effect this was having on my rig's temperatures, so during a Civilization session yesterday evening, I ran HWMonitor to keep an eye on things. Afterwards, I was shocked to see my CPU temp had peaked at 52°C, which is the highest I've seen it since installing the Corsair H80i. It's a reasonable assumption that if I had actually been running Prime 95 and fully maxing out my CPU cores, I would have seen a BSOD or the system lock up!

While researching overclocking in preparation for my own experiments, I did find posts from individuals who stated they had to decrease their voltages and/or clock speeds during summer months and I can now see why! Following yesterdays observation, I started to speculate on how I might improve the situation:

• The Corsair H80i recommends installing the radiator fans so they act as an intake for optimal cooling. However, I had installed them in an exhaust configuration because the radiator is positioned at the rear of my case and I'm not keen on changing this because:
  1. It would disrupt the front-to-back airflow I have currently in the system.
  2. There's not much room behind the case; there's a wall there, and it's positioned between our desk and our entertainment centre. I'm not convinced pulling in air from that region of the room will be particularly cool, especially given heat being dumped out there by the PSU and other electronic systems nearby.
  3. I would need more dust guards to place over the fans if they were intakes, which would most likely hamper their efficiency (I noticed a reasonable drop in cooling performance when I installed the dust guards over my side-door fans).
• I could position a desk fan to assist with circulating air around the case itself. This isn't an ideal solution but might help to ferry the hot air away from the rear of the case as well as provide cooler air to be pulled in by the intake fans.
• The Corsair H80i is currently has the fans configured with the "Balanced" profile, perhaps I need to switch to "High Performance". This will likely make the system far noisier, but should help bring the CPU temps down.
• There may be some benefit to me tweaking the Corsair Link software as I'm unsure if the fan speed is changing based on temperature; I didn't notice any change in pitch or volume while playing. I did have a couple of issues with software:
  1. I couldn't successfully run the Link software in my non-privileged user account. When I attempt to launch the application, I get prompted for my admin password, and I can actually see a Corsair Link process in Task Manager, but I'm unsure if it's actually working because no window gets rendered to my screen!
  2. I had problems linking the fan speed to the CPU temperature. Since unlocking an additional CPU core, the core temperatures reported by the chip itself no longer works. Instead I rely on the CPU temperature as reported by the motherboard. However, the Corsair Link software seemingly only allows me to use either the chip-reported core temps (which are always 0°C and therefore useless), or the coolant temperature. I'll have to investigate this further, as I might have to try and discern what threshold to raise fan speed using the coolant's temperature if I can't figure out how to use the motherboard reported CPU temp.
• It's possible to replace the stock H80i fans, which some people have suggested can improve cooling performance, so I might have a dig around online to see those that offer the biggest improvement.
• I was already considering purchasing a fan controller unit, perhaps this would be useful now; allowing me to force the remainder of my case fans to higher RPMs during the hot spell.

I'll have to wait for payday before I splash out on any new gear, so I'll probably try tweaking the Corsair software for now and/or positioning a desk fan to point at the system. It's fortunate that I picked up on this now, before I tried any thing crazy like pushing my overclock any further!

Corsair H80i: Cooling Upgrade

After my experimentation with overclocking (parts 1 and 2) and an small change to the cooling in my system, I had decided to upgrade my from the Arctic Freezer Pro rev 2 to a Corsair H80i. After the switch, I was very impressed to notice my CPU running more than 10°C cooler when at load, whether it's Prime 95 or Arma2! This should give me the headroom I need to try and push the clock speed a little higher. While I installed the new CPU cooler, I took plenty of pictures to document the process. Some of the more choice shots are below.

Here are the upgrades; I decided that if I was going to go to the trouble of upgrading the cooler, I should get some decent thermal paste. I went with Arctic Silver 5, as it's well known and gets good reviews and feedback all over the web.

The patient, ready for the transplant:

Here's the cooling loop, and the CPU block with some protective plastic still attached.

My Phenom II after removing the old cooler and clearing off the old thermal paste. It hadn't seen the light of day for three years now...

Another shot of the cooling loop. I promise the bottle of white spirit to the side was just to help clean off the thermal paste from the CPU block.

This is the radiator, with both fans attached, mounted on the inside of my Thermaltake M9. There was a brief moment of panic when I thought it wasn't going to fit inside the chassis!

The next couple of shots show the tinting process, which precedes the actual "proper" application of the Arctic Silver 5 paste. As per the instructions in the guide provided on the Arctic Silver site, I applied a small amount of the compound to each metal surface (on the CPU block and CPU itself) and spread it carefully using an old BCS membership card. This is meant to reduce the burn-in process by filling in the microscopic valleys in the metal surfaces.

After applying the thermal compound (using the "middle dot" method recommended on the Arctic Silver site), I managed to get the CPU block positioned and secured over the CPU.

As the chassis doesn't have great cable management, I try to position spare cables alongside the motherboard tray in the space available.

A couple of shots of the finished job, during the day (not as impressive as the later night shots in my opinion). You can see the illuminated Corsair logo on the CPU block, by default it's a white-coloured light, but it's possible to change this in the Corsair Link software.

And with the side panel off.

Once the daylight began to fade, I took a few more shots - I think the case looks more impressive in the evening!

And finally: the money shot. A close up of the CPU block inside my rig. By this time, I'd set the logo to be a blue colour in the Corsair Link software. It is possible to set the logo to change colour depending on temperature, but I decided against this because I can't see inside the machine while I'm gaming.

Feeling the Heat

I have been meaning to give my old Samsung X60s a service for a while; ever since I originally set the machine up as a combined home security system and media centre in fact. The system had always been a bit noisy and this had become much worse of late. Today I booted the machine up in order to listen to some music and after running for a few minutes it powered off without warning. Switching the machine on again resulted in the same outcome.

I pulled the machine out of it's dock and booted it up a third time, this time I simply switched to another virtual console just to quickly check the syslog file. There I found the following message:

Apr 21 13:56:20 media-centre kernel: [ 372.609087] Critical temperature reached (97 C), shutting down.

So, I had to bite the bullet and take apart the machine to try and clean out the dust. I thought I'd take some pictures to document the process: