CPU cooling for the bone idle

[vometia]

Does anybody have any tips for improving PC cooling with no effort at all, specifically of the CPU?

I have a factory OCed Intel i7 6700 running at 4.0 GHz (actually according to monitoring programs it's typically going up to 4.2 GHz, but anyway).  It has a stock cooler which is supposed to be very good, from what I understand, but lately has been getting a bit hot.  I noticed some graphics artefacts, which I think are actually a software problem rather than hardware failure (they're not persistent enough for hardware IME, and even if it is, it's unlikely to be the CPU as there's been no other trouble with e.g. software crashes or blue screens) but it did lead me to check on the hardware and I was a bit alarmed to see the CPU was regularly hitting 100⁰C under load, which is not awesome.

I've vacuumed out its heat sink (yeah I know... I grounded myself FWIW), removed the dust from the fan intakes/exhausts and put the side-panel back on (!) but it's still going up to 82⁰C, which is still not optimal, and I dare say under prolonged load it may go higher.

Idle temperatures are okay at 35-40⁰, and the GPU (Radeon R9 390) idles at the low 30s and tops out at the mid 60s which is what I would expect to see, so I'm not really sure what's the deal with the CPU.  Its fan speed seems a little low to me at 2,200 rpm, though there's no option to increase it in the BIOS except to change the profile for when 100% fan speed kicks in, so I've reduced the temperature at which it maxes out, but I can't see it'll make any difference under continuous load.  And "continuous load" is still only 30% for the package as a whole when running FO4, even with threading turned on, since most of the workload is still done by one thread.  I have hyperthreading turned off because I don't see the point: not sure what effect this has on temperature, but as far as I'm concerned it just duplicates the OS's multitasking efforts without having enough information to do so as effectively.  But that's another matter.

I guess I don't want to go to a huge amount of effort to improve it, but I don't want my CPU's life to be shortened (not that I've ever experienced one actually die on me in the 35+ years I've been using small computers) and nor do I want to enjoy any "juddering" as the CPU's equivalent of a rev limiter kicks in.  But largely it just annoys me because it shouldn't be like that.

I'm guessing that realistically I need to be looking at better case fans and/or a better CPU cooler, though both are a fair bit of effort, particularly the latter, and it's so hard to choose something that's actually more effective as so much after-market stuff is a classic case of "all mouth and no trousers".

I was wondering if anybody had any thoughts.  Especially of the labour-saving variety.

Edited February 18, 2018 by vometia

[HeyYou]

Meaner heat sink and fan...... Easy to change, and there are cooling solutions out there that are FAR better than stock.

[vometia]

I thought that might be the case: stock coolers are usually "it'll do" and my perception of that is "it'll just about do" when OCed.  But it seems it's not doing.

Any recommendations?  Because I'm that person who given a choice of everything will manage to choose something that's worse than the stock cooler!  Has to be air-cooled: as much as I think liquid cooling is awesome coming from a mainframe background (I think one of the reasons the Vax 9000 failed is because they never bothered to fix the gremlins with its water cooling and they ended up being air-cooled... though its main adversary was probably marketing) and my PC case even comes with holes for water cooling pipes, I'm not sure I could deal with the trauma.

[HeyYou]

Something like this would be some serious overkill. (which is what I prefer for CPU cooling.....)

[vometia]

I think my CPU needs overkill!  It's quite expensive but worth a look if you reckon it works as advertised.  I hope it's clear about the direction of its airflow, as an awful lot of cooling stuff seems to be quite obtuse in that regard.

[RabidGears]

It could be a faulty CPU fan. I would get an 3rd party fan anyway, though. And also try different thermal paste.

When it comes to case fans, make sure that enough air is coming into the case. If more air is being exhausted than is coming in, it could make the CPU fan less effective, although I would expect the same symptoms to affect the graphics card if that was happening.

As an emergency measure to help with airflow you can take the side panel off the case. You'll have to clean the dust out more often, though. Just make sure it's in a place that it's not likely to get accidentally kicked.

 

[vometia]

I did have the side-panel off, I think putting it back on saw a slight improvement of around 5⁰ (the corner of my lair where the computer lives has very poor air-flow, so I think it really needs the fans to help).  But I think you're right about checking the case fans.  I suspect it also doesn't help that the only intake fan is positioned right in front of a bank of HDDs which obstruct at least 50% of the airflow: I wonder if it wouldn't be more helpful to reverse the direction of at least two of the fans: it has three, one in the top cover and one in the rear top which exhaust the air, as well as the PSU in the bottom and the GPU also acting as exhausts, and one very obstructed intake at the bottom front which also tends to vacuum the carpet for me, rather unhelpfully.  I have to wonder if reversing the direction of the front and top fans would make a significant difference.

And yeah, I should probably get on with changing the CPU cooler, I just can't face the idea of potentially having to remove the motherboard to do it.

[RabidGears]

Reversing the top one would be a good idea, but if the front one is an intake then you don't need to reverse it. If you feel that you're still not getting enough air after that then you could get another static pressure fan for the front, if there's room.

[donnato]

This is a bullet proof install solution ... With case fans they just move what`s already inside and ....hopefully move it out.. this pulls the heat right out and exhausts it directly out.   I`ve had one for 5+ years now with no trouble at all ...      https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835181100

Edited February 19, 2018 by donnato

[Leonardo]

12 hours ago, RabidGears said:

It could be a faulty CPU fan. I would get an 3rd party fan anyway, though. And also try different thermal paste.

Yep, I would do that to.  That's why I always make sure I have a tube of silver thermal paste at home, just in case my CPU cooler run hot.

From what I understand the Artic Cooler - Silver Thermal Paste is what most computer store is recommending, at least where I live in Sweden, one when it comes for better cooling in combination of a 3rd party CPU cooler.

[vometia]

Oh, that's a point, the point being good thermal paste.  And the reason I'm making that point is that I once bought some very bad thermal paste a long time ago that ended up causing problems.

Would somebody be kind enough to remind me if I'd need to remove the MB to replace the cooler or can I attach a new one in situ?

And Don, I love the idea of having liquid cooling but I'm not quite so sure about the idea of doing it.   So maybe not at the moment.  I also don't know if the water needs to be specially treated: I know it's on a much smaller scale, but I do remember one of the computer centres I worked in had a distiller if the mainframes' cooling systems needed topping up since tap water could've potentially caused an expensive problem.  Not sure why they needed topping up, these were ICL ones which I think were more like a scaled up version of PC cooling in that they had their own closed-circuit cooler instead of being plumbed into the building's cooling as IBM tended to do.  Anyway, I digress.

I think for the time being I'll just turn the top fan around as RabidGears suggested, and hopefully having cool air blowing over the CPU cooler will have the desired effect and not simply make everything else in the case much hotter!  I'm not sure the designers thought out the airflow terribly well since there's two outlet fans right next to the CPU (the one at the back and one right above it) and a seemingly inadequate supply of fresh air.

[HeyYou]

You *shouldn't* have to..... Should be a quick swap......

[RabidGears]

Most cases have a cutout on the plate that you attach the motherboard to that you use to access the back of the MB. Take the other side panel off and check if yours has something like that. If it does, then you can mount the cooler without removing the MB.

On thermal paste: I use Arctic MX-4. I've found it good, plus it's non-conductive.

Water cooling is overkill unless you're overclocking or your house is extremely hot. There's also a potential for it to leak.

[Leonardo]

14 hours ago, vometia said:

Would somebody be kind enough to remind me if I'd need to remove the MB to replace the cooler or can I attach a new one in situ?

What HeyYou said, you shouldn't have to, but you might need to pull it out of the chassi.  Just to see better where to attach it.

[vometia]

I had a look at the mounting panel thingy but there's no cut-out, sadly.  Curious, as the case has a lot of labour-saving features but that isn't one of them, so I'll see how I get on with reversing part of its airflow first.  I really can't face the prospect of disconnecting and reconnecting everything, especially the fiddly little header things which are always inadequately documented and always have bent pins.  Okay, that last one tends to be my fault.

I still love the idea of water cooling, but I also love the idea of having a tidy case with neat cable runs and things like that.  I suspect neither is especially likely to happen.

[Leonardo]

Most modern mobo today has screws attached to the mobo and those screws can be removed if necessary.  Of course, I dunno how it is like with a barebone though.

A tip, when I built my PC over 15 years ago I asked them if they could help me to mount the CPU+CPU fan since I haven't done that before and they didn't refused.

So take the opportunity and ask if someone can help you with the CPU cooler at the same time you purchase it and often they won't refuse such a request.

[vometia]

I went for the pre-assembled version this time round as I'd previous had minor compatibility glitches matching stuff like the memory to my MB (you'd think this stuff should "just work" if you've got the basics like clocks and what-not right, but apparently not) and really couldn't face going through that headache again: so this time I figured I'd let someone else work through the pain!  I forget if they offered options for coolers but I tend to sometimes take things quite literally and think I was working on the understanding that the stock cooler was "good enough" even with a hefty overclock.  Which to be fair it generally is... just about, and under ideal conditions.

But yeah, next time, assuming I don't go back to self-build, I think I'll specify a better cooler.  At least one thing about current CPUs and chipsets is that they don't need upgrading every other year: my previous one was eight years old and ultimately the only reason I upgraded is because it was impossible to install more memory (weird tri-channel stuff that was becoming increasingly obscure and expensive, and it was absurdly fussy about what sort it would play nice with).

Edited February 20, 2018 by vometia

[Leonardo]

19 hours ago, vometia said:

But yeah, next time, assuming I don't go back to self-build, I think I'll specify a better cooler. 

May I ask, why?

Your post reminds me about the local computer store there is in my home town, called Inet and their wesite is inet.se/.  The people who work there is friendly and helpful as they know a lot about what hardware fits together and what not fits. They also often take order for a pre-built computer from their customer and I would recommend that to anyone who aren't sure about computers in general, not saying you are, without promoting Inet.

So next time you want to get yourself a better computer than you have today then goto your local computer store, if there is one of course, and tell the people who work their what you want to have like; what video card, monitor, motherboard, how much RAM, and what kind of a CPU plus a good tower chassi and ask what is the best cooler for your next PC.

[vometia]

I'm extremely agoraphobic and rarely leave the house, so it does place certain limits on my abilities to speak to people directly, annoyingly; I also live in Oxford which is extremely difficult to get around by any means. :/

I'm fairly experienced with building computers, having done my own PCs on and off since the mid '90s and minicomputers (mostly big noisy Motorola VME based things, and the occasional Vax) since the late '80s.  But the trouble tends to come in when there's subtle and difficult to predict incompatibilities with things like memory sticks and motherboards; though in the case of my old tri-channel i7 920, it appears another problem may have been that a lot of the MBs had slightly bent pins in the CPU socket that meant a slightly indifferent connection which may have also been the cause of the memory problems.

But mostly as I just can't be bothered.  I've assembled (and disassembled and reassembled... etc) computers so many times now that I just think I've done my time!  Someone else can do it now.  I even caught myself saying "life's too short to program in C", though I still haven't found a language I would prefer using, as annoying and tedious as C often is.

Sorry, hopefully that doesn't read like "look at all this stuff I've done!" when it isn't that awesome, though I am quite happy for it to read "look at all this stuff I've variously meddled with and broken!"

Edited February 20, 2018 by vometia

[Leonardo]

That's understandable and I know how it is.  I too had sometimes pounded my head into a wall just because something doesn't fit.

On 2018-02-20 at 9:31 PM, vometia said:

I even caught myself saying "life's too short to program in C", though I still haven't found a language I would prefer using, as annoying and tedious as C often is.

If you haven't try it then why not give Delphi a try and from what I know Delphi is a little easier since it is based on Pascal.

[vometia]

I think I'm too set in my ways.   I never really got on with Pascal, though I admit I haven't used it since I was at college 30 years ago; I saw Ada as a possibility (and modern compiler suites tend to support that as well as C) but I also haven't used that in 30 years so I'm not sure how long it'd take me to figure it out.  People keep coming out with helpful suggestions and I still keep on going "I hate C and life's too short!" but I continue to use it anyway.  I mean it does actually do what I want, it's just so tiresome to do the basic stuff, even with assorted libraries and macros and things, but I really can't see myself using anything else.

Back to cooling, I reversed the airflow of the top fan which made a tiny improvement but again just a couple of degrees, so there's no avoiding the fact that I really do need a better CPU cooler.

[Leonardo]

6 hours ago, vometia said:

"I hate C and life's too short!"

I need to ask.  Does the " C " mean a 'c' as it is in computers?

Nah, joke saide.  Seriously, I too find it hard, sometimes to hard, to get myself into the programming world by learning a decent programming langauge.

6 hours ago, vometia said:

Back to cooling, I reversed the airflow of the top fan which made a tiny improvement but again just a couple of degrees, so there's no avoiding the fact that I really do need a better CPU cooler.

Good luck.

Edited February 22, 2018 by Leonardo

[vometia]

I think the "C" stands for "creates subtle logic bugs that you'll spend all week trying to find"!  It's the successor to B, which I guess you know, and there is a tentative language D which fixes a lot of its shortcomings but unfortunately has never really caught on.  It's one of the few things I may have considered migrating to if it was more widespread, and is certainly nicer than C++ which I refuse to go anywhere near.

Sadly, the cooling thing didn't make a lot of difference: it may have gone down by another couple of degrees but I think I need to accept I have to fit a better cooler; so it'll be off to Amazon for something or other, some conductive paste and some cleaner since I can't remember where my bottle of the stuff has gone.  I'm sure it never used to be this bad though I have terrible luck with fans gradually dying which I suspect may be happening as 2,200 rpm doesn't seem terribly fast for a fairly small fan; and the heat sink is simply too small to work at all effectively without some serious ventilation going on.

The computer's going to need some other surgery too, as I decided to invest in an SSD thingy only to find I'm out of SATA connectors: the motherboard only has six and I have three RAID-1 arrays.  At some point I should really just buy a pair of much bigger drives and consolidate them but I'm not in much of a mood to be dealing with drive letter hell!

[HeyYou]

Oh come on. Where's your sense of ADVENTURE!!!

[vometia]

1 hour ago, HeyYou said:

Oh come on. Where's your sense of ADVENTURE!!!

I seem to have lost it somewhere.