Making a CPU duct to draw outside air onto CPU!

[Alien]

Originally Posted by keithwalton

Regarding the water cooler, have amd changed the retention method for the heatsink between the different A64 sockets ? IE would a 754/939 air cooler work with AM2 ? I have some recolection that they did tweak things abit which meant all good 939 coolers were just with AM2.

I'm not sure. I do know that the Freezer 64 Pro will do s754 & s939, & it doesn't come with any extra brackets or whatever, so maybe the mounting mechanisms for them are all the same.

Originally Posted by Web-Junkie

@Alien: No need to fit your cooler, I'll order one and if it works, it works, if it doesn't it hasn't broke the bank! The CPU fan is the stock AMD one. It's controlled by the mobo via PWM (4 pin CPU fan connector) and according to PC Probe it was spinning at 6000RPM, temp up around 60°C! Not sure whats gone wrong unless the clip has come loose on the heatsink. The additional fan in the Crosshair box is not connected, it's only used when passive cooling like a watercooler is used, not when air cooling is used so the stock cooler is plugged into the CPU fan connector.

I've just been looking at the ACF64P again, after reading a review of it. It is a rather big heatsink, & it looks like the fan will be above the first 1 or 2 RAM slots. Hopefully there'll be enough clearance so that I can leave the RAM in there, but once it's installed, if I wanted to remove the RAM I'd have to remove the heatsink [or at least unclip the fan, which is pretty simple] first. [when I eventually do it, I mean] Although your board is about 1.6" wider than mine, the RAM looks roughly the same distance from the CPU socket as mine, so you may want to bear in mind the above if you get the ACF64P.

More important than that though is that heatsink between the CPU socket & rear I/O ports. I was worried that it might be too close to allow the ACF64P to be fitted, but having spent a few mins looking at the pic of the Crosshair & the cooler I think you might just get away with it.

Originally Posted by Web-Junkie

At least the system is stable! It's not resetting, freezing or BSOD'ing, YET!!

Well that's always a good thing.

Originally Posted by Web-Junkie

As for the AM2 compatability, not sure! The board I put this water cooler in was a socket 940 and we had to remove the black bracket around the CPU and then put 4 bolts through the back of the mobo and backplate and then put a 'H' bracket over the bolts and slide it onto the water block then screw it down. It may work on an AM2, but won't know now he's selling it!

s940? So it was an Opteron board then? From recent reading, & as mentioned previously, I think it would have fitted, as it did say all K8, & AM2 is K8, as are s940 Opterons.

I had no issues with the AF64 the fan does sit quite high so hopefully will be out of the way. I would be concerned for a AM2 cpu getting upto 60 degrees there may be some kind of fault here perhaps with the mobo I had a Gigabyte mobo that just cooked D805 cpus that were perfectly fine in other boards even with freezer pros on they were just hot ,I had to rma the mobo. Lets hope the AF64 brings your temps down.If temps continue to rise to these levels I feel you may need to try it in a different board

[Alien]

Originally Posted by zinglebarb

I had no issues with the AF64 the fan does sit quite high so hopefully will be out of the way.

With standard RAM, perhaps, let's just hope he doesn't have Corsair Dominator or some other RAM with extra tall heat spreaders/sinks.

Originally Posted by zinglebarb

I would be concerned for a AM2 cpu getting upto 60 degrees there may be some kind of fault here perhaps with the mobo I had a Gigabyte mobo that just cooked D805 cpus that were perfectly fine in other boards even with freezer pros on they were just hot ,I had to rma the mobo. Lets hope the AF64 brings your temps down.If temps continue to rise to these levels I feel you may need to try it in a different board

I was going to dispute this point, but then I thought to check the power useage for his 5600. My 6000 uses 125w, whereas his 5600 is only supposed to use 89w. If his temps are the same or higher than mine with the tissue paper removed from the front fan [that might be hindering air flow], & with the stock AMD cooler, then something's definitely not right. Having said that, apparently AS can take a few days to "cure" or "settle" or whatever.

@Web-Junkie: It might be a good idea to post your system temp as well when posting CPU temp, might give us a more complete picture of the situation.

Even in machines with no other cooling and with stock coolers x2 cpus ive used on AM2 have not even nearly reached such temps. My daughters 4200 with a stock cooler is no where near this under normal load and the case has no other cooling at all.I know this is a lesser cpu but the last amd cpu in accept as ok at a normal temp of 60 degrees in a thoroughbred

was this temp under orthos or normal load? I cant seem to find it there is a lot of babble in this thread and I think I may have missed it

[Alien]

Originally Posted by zinglebarb

Even in machines with no other cooling and with stock coolers x2 cpus ive used on AM2 have not even nearly reached such temps. My daughters 4200 with a stock cooler is no where near this under normal load and the case has no other cooling at all.I know this is a lesser cpu but the last amd cpu in accept as ok at a normal temp of 60 degrees in a thoroughbred

Depends whether her 4200 is the 89w version or the 65w version. If the latter, that would explain the diffference in that instance.

Originally Posted by zinglebarb

was this temp under orthos or normal load? I cant seem to find it there is a lot of babble in this thread and I think I may have missed it

AFAIK full load, but not sure if it was Orthos or something else.

Oh, & Web_Junkie, apparently the paste on the ACF64P is their older MX-1 compound [it's their newer MX-2 which is supposedly better than AS5], which is apparently not as good as AS5 [don't know how it compares to AS2], so if you decide to buy some AS5 as well, then definitely go with that instead of the pre-applied MX-1.

its not EE

[keithwalton]

I wouldnt be too fussed about which thermal paste you use, as yes they can make a difference but its actually quite small.

The more silver a paste has in it the more solid it is and thus lower thermal resistance, however the more silver thats in it the harder is it to apply a thin smooth void free layer. The way i tend to apply paste is different to most.
I will put the normal blob in the middle but then i'd use an old plastic card to spread out the paste nice and smooth on the heatspreader, then i'll put the two together and move the heatsink relative to the cpu slightly, this works out all the air bubbles and its why it becomes difficult to pull the heatsink off because i've made a good seal between the two.

It sounds to me that somthing has gone wrong with contact patch, by spinning the fan fast the mobo is trying to compensate for the high thermal resistance. I'd suspect there is a patch of the heatspreader which has no thermal goo on it.

Most pre-applied stuff these days is just that pre-applied paste which is actually really good compared to the 'thermal pads' of a few years ago which were more like sticky tape than a thermal compound and required alot of burning in. If you got the pad really hot it would form a better thermal seal, i used to do this by idleing the machine in the bios with the fan disabled letting the temps build up before shutting it off. I used to see a drop in fully loaded temps of between 5-10C by doing this.


As for the chips themselves 125w is quite high! my quad core is only 105w (note this is a maximum, worst of the worst shipped value, most are alot lower than this)
The 65w X2's are the 65nm chips which are few and far between!

And as for the amd demo, seem's there has been quite a response to our comments!

As for zing aah the old t'bred, to small of a cpu die to consistantly remove the heat it produced, hence why they followed intel with the heatspreader route

[Web-Junkie]

Ordered the AF64 Pro and some OCZ Ultra 5+! Might as well get the ball rolling

Won't be using the puter much today so no point worrying about the high temps, AF will be here tomorrow hopefully so it won't matter, unless it's a faulty board as Zing says, will find out soon enough!

Defo gonna apply new paste like keith said, I use an old SKY card to spread the paste on.

And Alien, system temp is bout 40°C according to PC Probe, will take the tissue paper off and see if makes a difference when I fit my AF64, also waiting for some filter stuff from my mate, rung him up but he's not in was hoping to get that tomorow too!

So tomorrow is when it all goes bang

[Alien]

Originally Posted by keithwalton

The way i tend to apply paste is different to most.
I will put the normal blob in the middle but then i'd use an old plastic card to spread out the paste nice and smooth on the heatspreader, then i'll put the two together and move the heatsink relative to the cpu slightly, this works out all the air bubbles and its why it becomes difficult to pull the heatsink off because i've made a good seal between the two.

Aside from the moving it after you've put it on bit, I think that's the way a lot of people do it.

Originally Posted by keithwalton

It sounds to me that somthing has gone wrong with contact patch, by spinning the fan fast the mobo is trying to compensate for the high thermal resistance. I'd suspect there is a patch of the heatspreader which has no thermal goo on it.

If that were the case I'd expect the temps to be higher. Then again, assuming there's not some sort of problem with fan speed reporting on his system [either software or hardware] his fan [same as I have] is running twice the speed of mine.

Originally Posted by keithwalton

Most pre-applied stuff these days is just that pre-applied paste which is actually really good compared to the 'thermal pads' of a few years ago which were more like sticky tape than a thermal compound and required alot of burning in.

The 1 I really hated was that pink stuff you'd get on the bottom of Cooler Master heatsinks. IIRC the stock heatsink that came with my XP1900 had the same stuff on it. Simplest way to get that stuff off was to remove any plastic parts [including fan] from the heatsink & then put it in the freezer for a couple of hours until the pink stuff went brittle, which made it easy to scrape off with a finger nail.

Originally Posted by keithwalton

As for the chips themselves 125w is quite high! my quad core is only 105w (note this is a maximum, worst of the worst shipped value, most are alot lower than this)

Yeah, but those C2DQs are 65nm, aren't they? As for the 125w of mine, there's an AMD util that's supposed to monitor power useage. Hopefully it'll give more than voltage, which I already know [1.43v - Web_junkie: yours shouldn't be higher than 1.35v (+/- 0.05v)].

Originally Posted by keithwalton

The 65w X2's are the 65nm chips which are few and far between!

Actually, there are 65w in 90nm as well:
http://www.amdcompare.com/us-en/desktop/default.aspx
Set options as follows:
CPU: Athlon 64 X2 dual core
Manufacturing Tech: 90nm SOI
Wattage: 65w
& you'll see there's models listed from 3800 to 5200

After a bit of searching, there are 4200, 4600, 5200 models available at 90nm & 65w.

65nm: plenty of 4000+, 4400+, 4800+, 5000+

Originally Posted by keithwalton

And as for the amd demo, seem's there has been quite a response to our comments!

Where?

Originally Posted by keithwalton

As for zing aah the old t'bred, to small of a cpu die to consistantly remove the heat it produced, hence why they followed intel with the heatspreader route

It was the T-bird [specifically the 1.44Ghz model] that was legendary for its heat output, not so much the T-breds.

Originally Posted by Web-Junkie

Ordered the AF64 Pro and some OCZ Ultra 5+! Might as well get the ball rolling

Won't be using the puter much today so no point worrying about the high temps, AF will be here tomorrow hopefully so it won't matter, unless it's a faulty board as Zing says, will find out soon enough!

Hmm... I had a thought about that. AMD provide some utils here that might be useful. I was thinking mainly of the power monitor. It would be interesting to see if they tally with SpeedFan & PC Probe. If it's using too much power that could potentially cause an increase in temps [would mean Zing was right about the mobo ].

Originally Posted by Web-Junkie

Defo gonna apply new paste like keith said, I use an old SKY card to spread the paste on.

That's what I do as well.

Originally Posted by Web-Junkie

And Alien, system temp is bout 40°C according to PC Probe, will take the tissue paper off and see if makes a difference when I fit my AF64, also waiting for some filter stuff from my mate, rung him up but he's not in was hoping to get that tomorow too!

40°C? [img]Download Failed (1)[/img] That's bloody warm for the inside of a case. Either the reading's wrong or... I dunno. From what you've described you ought to have plenty of airflow to keep system temps lower than that. What about the Crosshair's extra plug-in temp sensors, maybe you could use them to find out what area is putting out the extra heat. That might provide the clue as to how to drop your temps. 60°C [under load] may be uncommon for a CPU, but so is 40°C for a system temp unless you lived somewhere really hot & didn't have air conditioning.

[Web-Junkie]

Well I'm in a small room and have a 17" CRT that kicks out a lot of heat, this room DOES get warm quickly if I have the door closed and the curtains drawn at night, even with the window open. When the AF64 arrives I'll hang one of those sensors near the middle of the case and one near/touching the CPU and see what the readings are! I don't think It's wise to try and trap the sensor between heatsink and cpu though! Vcore is showing 1.33v, so that's right!

Already installed the Dual Core Optimizer and enabled Cool n Quiet, although the Processor driver is showing 1.3.2.0 and there is a 1.3.2.16, so installed that but it's still showing the same version in device manager after a reboot?

One thing I have done is use the EPP of the RAM to set it to performance in BIOS, this changes the timings to 4-4-4-12 and increases the DDR voltage from 1.8v to 2.38v and DIMM VTT from 0.9v to 1.18v according to PC Probe and Everest. although I can't explain why it's showing CPU Hypertransport at 1.39v when it should be 1.20v, not overclocked the CPU unless it's tied in with the SLI memory? Those are the only 3 voltages showing RED in PC Probe.

Installed the Power Monitor, why does everything need a sodding reboot , but just shows the power as 1 red bar on the graph for each core! I turn all power saving options off in XP, always have and Vcore is showing 1.3v so that ties with PC Probe and Everest. Installed Dashboard too, jeeeesus another sodding reboot , but I think it's broke, CPU is showing 40°C no matter what I do and the fan speed is always showing MIN!!

Ripped the tissue off the inside of the case front and system is now idling at 42°C for CPU and 39°C for system. When I've fitted the AF64 I'll try using front fan and 1 exhaust and then front fan and 2 exhaust and see which works best, no side fans! Then I'll see if 1 side fan exhausting or 2 exhausting affects temps as well.

[Web-Junkie]

AF64 arrived this morning!

First problem was the clamping lever was on the wrong side, it looked like it would interfere with the fins on the mobo heatpipe and be awkward to get at when in place. Unscrewed the retention assembly and re-assembled it 180° now the lever is the correct side, fan is still pointing to the front of the case!

Second problem is the base of the heatsink is dog rough and concave! Scraped all the gunk off and used the edge of a SKY card to see if it was flat, in one direction it's concave and 90° to it it's nearly flat, but the finish is very rough! So either I leave it at that and hope it's OK or try to lap it flat and get a better finish, should I lap it? More damn work

[keithwalton]

AMD's 65nm process really is going like intel's 90nm process in being to hot and to slow.

The 1.4GHz Thunderbird was until the intel prescott's the highest thermal output chip ever this is true, but it was a 180nm cpu and had the die size to match the enormous heat output.

However when amd made the jump to 130nm with the thoroughbred (Tbred) the physical die size of the chip shrunk significantly, the thermal output did drop but not by as much. So the thermal output per mm went up to a point amd really had trouble with the chips and had to delay them and ship them with coolers that had copper inserts. They didnt last long before the Tbred-B came out where they changed the way the chip was layered up which solved the high heat density problem.

Then the barton took over with its bigger cache which made a much bigger die (intel had been using larger l2 cache all along and heatspreaders as well so didnt have the problem).

I'm surprised the AF64's surface was so rough, perhaps they are cutting corners these days


Edit - Having checked wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlon) There was the palomino in between the thunderbird and the thoroughbred, the palomino was the first 'Athlon XP' and raised the clockspeed compared to the tbird (b/c) and was made at 180nm.
The move to 130nm with Tbred (A) was abit of a flop as the whole point of a process change is to decrease core temps / increase working frequency and Tbred (A) failed to do both, it took TBred (B) to make any gains and I quote

The fourth-generation Athlon, the Thoroughbred, was released 10 June 2002 at 1.8 GHz, or 2200+ on the PR rating system. The "Thoroughbred" core marked AMD's first production 130 nm silicon, resulting in a significant reduction in die size compared to its 180 nm predecessor.

There are two versions of this core, commonly called A and B. The A version was introduced at 1800 MHz, and had some heat and design issues that held its clock scalability back. In fact, AMD wasn't able to increase its clock above Palomino's top grades. Because of this, it was only sold in versions from 1333 to 1800 MHz, replacing the larger Palomino core. The B version of Thoroughbred has an additional metal layer to improve its ability to reach higher clock speeds. It launched at higher clock speeds.

[Web-Junkie]

Aye, surface is very rough, you can see the milling marks on the block! In fact it looks like it's a piece from a surface roughness scratch guage

Brother is up town and is going to see if he can get some wet or dry paper, between 400-2000 grit according to lapping guides I've read, we'll see what abortion I can make of this, better put your tin hats on this could get messy!

[Web-Junkie]

Everything is in and working!

Lapped the copper bottom with some 400/800/1000/1500/2000 grit wet or dry, not a mirror finish but first time I've done it so not complaining, at least it was flat and nowhere near as rough as it was! One problem I had with the lapping was the copper bottom kept vibrating on the glass/sand paper if I pressed on too hard? Tried immersing fully in water while lapping and by just wetting the sand paper and gently rubbing back and forth, still vibrated if I pressed too hard! But, managed to get a decent finish in the end by not pressing too hard

Fitting the AF64 was tricky, the retention clip is so damn stiff even with one side clipped onto the lugs you really have to press down on the other clip to get it to mate plus it was extremely hard to flip the clamping lever and you could feel the force it was exerting when it clamped home. The lever was actually pulled sideways a bit the strain was so great! Used the OCZ Ultra 5+ paste, spread it over the CPU but the block of the AF64 does not cover the whole of the CPU, rather it fits flush on 2 adjacent edges of the CPU and the other two edges have a 1 - 1.5mm gap exposing the CPU and paste!

Put a sensor cable touching the exposed bit of the CPU core and one hanging near the middle of the case! Idle temps according to PC Probe:

CPU: 36°C
CPU Fan: 2300rpm
Mobo: 31°C
Sensor 1 - CPU: 36°C
Sensor 2 - case temp: 28°C

Everest was near identical readings 1°C difference on CPU sensor, 37°C.

Ran Othos in 'Blend - stress CPU and RAM' mode for 10 minutes and noted PC Probe readings:

CPU: 53°C
CPU Fan: 2300rpm
Mobo: 33°C
Sensor 1 - CPU: 47°C
Sensor 2 - case temp: 30°C

CPU still looks high! Turned off the only overclocking feature enabled in the BIOS, SLI Memory, and re-ran Othos for 10 mins and no change on temps! Either this CPU runs hot or I suck at fitting heatsinks, I think I know which one people will opt for!

53 on orthos is fine imo much better temps