I recently rebuilt my desktop, upgrading from an athlon 64 3800x2 to a Q6600. For cooling I got a freezer 7 pro (arctic cooling) and it's been working pretty well except for two small issues. One is that my load temps are higher than I would expect (63c running at 2.57ghz). I left the stock paste on the hsf as I saw in a few places that the paste they used was as good as AS5. Is this true? If not I'll replace it and see if that helps. Also, I have an 80mm vantec stealth exhaust fan on the top of my case, but the freezer's fan seems to move so much air that the exhaust fan doesn't actually exhaust anything at all (can barely lift a small scrap of paper). Would it be best if I flipped it around to make it an intake, or would it be better to just remove it entirely? Thanks for any help
I'd say leave it as-is on both counts mate. AS5 doesn't really make much difference (imho), a little perhaps, but unless you're desperate for really low temps then a degree is simply another number. 63'C is quite warm, but again, shouldn't be a problem. I'd say it's the limit of the Freezer 7's capacity tbh, maybe a cooler upgrade would help.
I did some reading and tried out realtemp to see if it reported anything different. CoreTemp, HWmon and speedfan all report a max of 63 over the 4 cores while realtemp says 57c. It also seems that 2 of the cores are consistently lower than the other 2 by a whole 6deg. C, not sure if this is normal or if it means that the paste shifted somehow to only cover one die... I have no experience w/multi-die chips since this is my first one so I don't know what to expect from it.
It's perfectly normal to see different temps between dies - not only are they different chips (and hence different temp sensors per core I'd expect), along with the fact that your cooler is mounted so that there's uneven pressure across it (because it's mounted against gravity, it twists slightly), so that leads to different contact levels. Basically, don't worry.
turn that top fan around to push some more air in, is there a exhaust fan on the back aswell? my quad sits well below 60 degree's at 3.6GHz using a arctic cooling freezer 7, and i kept the pre-applied thermal paste on it as i was rushing and couldn't be arsed to wait for paste to cure. lol
Just a thought to check this You dont mention what fan control you are using on the freezer pro (PWM?) what is your fan speed That fan should run around 2500rpm at full load If the board is controlling it what have you set it to? Its no good if the fan is idling or only doing 1600 rpm and only starts to speed up above 70 or so My intel board was rubbish at PWM my quad would reach 78 to 80 before it started to up the fan from its 1300rpm idle speed I run the fan as a 3 wire now it runs at 2400 rpm and I get about 65 under load with standard cooler
Ah that may very well have been it. I'm using PWM with the motherboard controlling it, but it looks like it only gets up to 2200 rpm under load. I'm going to try turning that off and see what temps I get. Right now I'm at 3ghz (333x9) and 67 max under load. Another possible factor that might limit my OC is that I was pretty sleepy when I installed the HS (bad idea I now realize) and installed it sideways the first time. I had to take it off and re-seat it, which meant that I had to move around the disturbed thermal paste as most of it had spread out to the edges. I'm getting some AS5 this weekend anyway as I should really have some lying around just in case, and I'm going to put that on too.
you should notice a decrease in temperature when you properly apply the heatsink. 67c at 3Ghz if normal on a Freezer i'd expect. but then, my Thermalright Ultra 120 extreme gets me 58c under load at 3.3Ghz.
Last weekend I used some AS5 to replace the old paste, and installed a fan on my NB heatsink as it didn't have one before and was causing troubles. Unfortunately I haven't seen any improvements in temps with the changes. To get it prime95 stable I have to increase vcore to about 1.41v in bios which gives me about 1.3 under load. This results in load temps of around 68. Even though your heatsink is better I'm surprised that my temps are so much higher. I can't think of anything else I might've done wrong either which leaves me somewhat confused.
I was under the impression that the arctic freezer was "amazing", "outstanding" etc etc. I've just ordered one for a Q6600 - I'm guessing I should have just forked out for the Tuniq?
The HSF's main job is to cool the processor, you still need a case fan to get the hot air produced out of the case. Make sure the two fans aren't competing. The AF is great bang-for-buck, but the Tuniq, Ninja, TRUE, et al are better (though considerably more expensive) coolers.
there is a difference between outstanding and amazing performance for value. AF7 is probably the best cooler for that price range. but if you want real performance, you can't go wrong with Thermalright Ultra 120 extreme or Tuniq.
