Hi, I have the following rig: i7 920 oc @4.00 Ghz Corsair H50 cooler 6 GB RAM ga-x58a-ud3r mobo 1tb Seagate 5770 Vapour-x Antec 300 case I have the Antec tri-cool top fan installed (on low) and the H50 fan on low as well. Idle, the temps are around 45 degrees C per core. When running games (i guess ones that don't tax it e.g. L4 dead 2) the cores go up to mid 60's when measures with real temp. However today I downloaded Prime95 and ran the 10 min test through real Temp. About 3/4 way through the test the max temp on core 1 was 92 oC, at which point I started to panic and cancelled the test. I have two questions: 1. Should I be worried about the above temps? 2. I want to buy some quieter fans to replace the Antec 300 1400mm top fan and to install one at the front and side. Ideally these would be automatically controlled by the motherboard (I thought about a fan controller but these seem complicated and I have very little knowledge of installing hardware.) So, does my mobo support automatic fan control of both the case fans and the H50 fan? If so, which fans do you recommend (need to be as quiet and effective as possible?) Thanks in advance.
I'd recommend Turing the H 50 up a bit as the idle temps are a bit high. Running a stress test like prime 95 is designed to max out everything to check it stability, so you should expect a major rise in temps. Throw in the fact that you've got quite a high overclock and all the numbers pretty much add up. As for fans if you want the mobo controlling them make sure they are PWM fans.
With an Akasa AK-CB002 you can control 3 PWM fans from your motherboard CPU fan header. I am not sure if anyone makes 140mm PWM fans, there are plenty of good 120mm ones around. I have an Antec 300 case (see sig) and a Vapor-X GPU and installing a side fan made no difference except to the motherboard temp - the CPU and GPU temps were within 1C of Prime95 tests without a fan. I have since blocked up the side fan hole. - Have you tried reseating the H50 with some good TIM, just in case? - What fans are you running on the H50? - What intake fans are you running in the front of the Antec 300? To be honest when I ran Prime95 with my fans on low speed, the temps started to rise. The Antec Tri-Cool fans don't push a lot of air on low. Have a look at the thread in my sig for the tests I ran and make your own mind up.
For an i7 920 at 4GHz you might have to accept needing to run the H50 fan a little faster to keep the temperatures down. I'd recommend a couple of Scythe Gentle Typhoons (1450rpm are still pretty quiet) in push-pull on the radiator. How do you have it mounted by the way? It needs to be sucking air in from outside to work properly. As you've only just downloaded P95 I'll go out on a limb and guess you didn't overclock this system yourself? If so, you might want to check the voltage across your CPU. It's not unheard of for pre-overclocked systems to come with a higher voltage than is actually necessary because they're only really concerned with getting it stable. If you can get it stable at a lower voltage you'll cut back on the heat a bit. Oh, and the default TIM on the H50 should be fine; most people seem to stick with it. I've never seen anyone claiming a dramatic improvement when switching to AS5 or anything.
90C is normal for the i7s, it has a max temp of 100C. However i would personally not like my i7 getting that hot. Remember though that Prime95 will max out your cpu, no game or app will ever push the cpu that hard.
forgot to add that there's an H50 thread around here somewhere, a search on that would probably show you what sort of temperatures others are getting with the CPU and a similar overclock.
