CPU temperature question

A common mistake is that people put too much paste on which means the heatsink has no proper contract with the processor.

 

Was the Intel system using an Intel chipset motherboard?

I really have found that Intel cpu's on intel boards run a lot better than any AMDs. Both my Dad and brother are professionals in IT so I have my fair share. Still it is only my experience so I will not say another word about it!


I wouldn't like to take a CPU above 80c. 100c would be a bit high I think.

 

Yep it was...

I think its overgeneralising to say one is better than the other - you know how it is with PC's... any combination of components can often cause problems with one another.

If you referring to my CPU regarding the temps, as I say mine is misreading - the maximum operating temperature of my CPU is 85 celcius, therefore it would have been ash by now if that was actually the correct temperature. Its a well known fact that my mobo actually reads about 30 celcius too high!

 

Agree with you there, Paul. A lot of it is down to component matching and quality of components. Regardless of CPU choice, be it Intel or AMD, I always think that buying decent memory (e.g. Crucial or Kingston), a decent motherboard (using a stable chipset from either NVidia or Intel - neither have given me problems) that is of reputable brand - I've always found Asus to be excellent and their budget spin-off, AsRock are pretty good too. Also, a decent power supply is a must - it can make or break the stablitiy of a system. Add to that ensuring that the system has decent cooling and you shouldn't have any problems.

 

My sisters is like this too, it reads too high. The problem is they use really cheap quality thermistors which don't give a good reading.

As a rule if your PC has been running fine for a long time ignore the temperature, but if it suddently increases check your fans and airflow etc.

 

Depends on the CPU. My CPUs can run at 'reduced' (i.e. 2.0GHz, 1GHz FSB), 'automatic' (scaling up or down as required) and 'fastest' (2.7GHz, 1.35GHz FSB) - and seeing temperatures up past 70C on 'fastest' is normal. That's with liquid cooling and lots of fans too

I have no idea what temp My Athlon XP 1800 runs at however - don't really care, I hardly use that machine anymore.

John

 

The temperature from any motherboard sensor won't be accurate. Asus Probe takes it's reading from a sensor under the CPU socket, not from the processor itself. Asus Probe on my Athlon 2100+ generally reports a CPU temperature 5 or 6 degrees lower than that reported in the BIOS. At the moment Probe says the CPU temperature is 31C - that's with 6 case fans and a 120mm CPU fan all ticking over at minimal voltage, keeping it nice and quiet. If I crank up the fans, the CPU temperature will only drop by 3 or 4 degrees, but the PC sounds like it's trying to take off.

Heath

 

Speaking of CPU temps and now fan speed controls, anybody now how I can manually control the speed of my CPU cooler's fan, preferably by software (if not I'd be interested in hardware solutions although nothing too fancy)?

I have an Asus A8V motherboard (with stock CPU cooler) and run Windows 2000 SP4.

The motherboard has a feature called cool'n'quiet which apparently automatically controls all system fan speeds, although I can see no way of manually overriding this system. Just wondering really if I can make the CPU fan quieter, it's not noisey but still the most audible component inside the case. The system generally runs at about 30C on average idle and goes up to 43C under load. CPU is an Athlon 64 3200+ (Venice core).

 

This arrived for me today My computer is now (again) completely silent

With the Zalman watercooler and the fanless PSU, the only moving parts are the hard disk and the CD drives. Silance to listen to music in!

 

The fan speed settings will probably be in the BIOS (they are on my PCs). You should be able to set the temperature at which the fans increase their speed. The Shuttle PC I have at work does this - sounds like a hoover when you turn it on, then slows the fan so you can hardly hear it, but if you do something that puts more demands on the processor, you hear the fan speed increase. In its default settings, the fan was much more noisy than after I raised the temperature setting in the BIOS.

You might find that the fan that came with the CPU heatsink is not the best quality though, and it might be worth changing it for a Papst or Panaflo fan. You need to be careful to make sure that the fan you buy has sufficient airflow though - you can't escape the link between noise and airflow, but good bearings and blade design can help. Also, a bigger fan will be quieter than a smaller fan when producing the same airflow as it doesn't need to run so fast, but you need to make sure that you can fit one to your heatsink.

Personally, I prefer the manual hardware solution rather than software (I once had a motherboard controlled fan speed regulator fail, which caused the CPU to overheat). I have a 3 position switch taking a feed off a 4 pin Molex power connector (one of those that powers hard drives, CDROMs, etc). This allows me to switch between 5V, 7V and 12V output to the fans in my PC. My case fans have a good air flow pattern, sucking cool air in at the bottom and blowing hot air out at the top. I replaced the whiny little fan off my graphics card with a passive radiator heatsink and put a Zalman Flower heatsink on the processor with a 120mm Panaflo fan over it (running at 7V because it doesn't turn at 5V). My PC isn't silent - but he noisiest thing in my PC is the hard drive, and I can hear the bearing chatter in the 120mm fan if I listen hard.

Heath

 

Had a quick look in the BIOS but couldn't see any way of adjusting the temperature thresholds which are used to trigger increases/decreases in fan speed. Although I have managed to slow the fans slightly by swiching on what's called Q-Fan.

I've still got a nice quiet large surface CPU cooler made by Zalman that I use to use on an old PC, I will try this at some point in place of the stock AMD cooler. Things are so quiet now I can just about hear the hard disk accessing / idling sometimes, something I've never been able to hear before (unless the hard disk has increased in noise with age).

 

My chip runs at about 40-44C - My brothers has more cooling and gets to about 28C. Most modern chips are ok up to 90C.

 

There's little doubt from what I've read. Current AMDs appear to significantly out perform current Intel CPUs.

 

I think Pentium M makes more sense for laptops but I see no reason why Intel is a better business choice over AMD for workstations. I think you've been brainwashed.

With our servers there are fewer options as they are all Xeon based, though I've heard very good things about the AMD equivalent CPU.

 

Hi,

I am looking at the amd v intel chips for a supercomputer I need to buy for my work. I am going to buy the linux networx ls1 system starting with 32 cores and scaling up to 1000s.

AMD scale better with increasing processors due to the MP architecture and their best compiler (pathscale) whups Intels. If you look at spec.org you will find amd on top.

Most of the highly paralell supercomputers and beowulf clusters are switching to opteron. Cheaper, faster, better scaling and less heat.

Nick.

 

We currently use Sun Blades, which have UltraSPARK processors, so that probably confuses the issue a bit more. We have 103 dual-processor Sun-Blades, each having up to 8 gigabytes of memory, connected to a fileserver with 1300 gigabytes of disk storage. Some of the Sun Blades have Myrinet cards installed for very high speed communication.

Heath

 

Have you seen the penguin blades? 48 cores in a 4u rack! Shame I need a shared memory interconnect for low latency gigabyte matrix memory transfers for my modelling work The linux networx machine has infiniband interconnect - which is produced by pathscale who also make the best amd compiler.

Arent sun switching to opteron?

I am installing a NAS with about half that capacity this afternoon.

 

maybve it's got some kind of viral infection..?