CPU Heatsink Fins Not Parallel?

[Xylophone]

So I tried installing a tower CPU cooler in my first build and I held the cooler by sandwiching the top and bottom fins between my thumb and other fingers (I'm guessing I shouldn't have done that). Anyways, I noticed that the fins moved along the heatpipes and also that some of the fins weren't parallel. Is this normal? How are the fins attached to the heatpipes anyways?

 

[Xylophone]

Sounds like they are just slotted on the heat pipes. You could lever them back gently with a screw driver, but if your temps are o.k. it is not actually necessary.

Thanks for the quick response! I guess I was just being finnicky.

 

[Xylophone]

The temps 'may' be a little lower with the fins spread out evenly, its up to you.
Personally I doubt you would see any improvement,unless the fins are bunched together badly.

Do you think the fins are still making good contact with the heatpipes though?

 

[Xylophone]

Yes,I suspect they are an 'interference' fit. Run speccy or core temp to check the cpu temperature.

Wouldn't interference fitting prevent the fins from sliding along the heatpipes?

And thanks for the suggestion, I've been wondering about good programs for checking CPU temps. Sorry for asking so many questions by the way.

 

[Xylophone]

Interference fit means its just 'tight'. Not that tight tho..
Mostly these things are made using minimal labor and care.
Enough to work, thats it.
Let us know what load temps you get,what cooler,what cpu.

I'll have to wait for the temp test because I'm waiting on RAM. I have a Thermalright Archon IBE-X2 and an Intel I7-6700K. I'll follow up with a temp test in a few days.

 

[Xylophone]

Double post/update: preliminary results are in

I ran Prime95 for 30 odd minutes on my i7-6700K (stock) at an ambient temperature of about 20C and the CPU temp stabilized at 50C. I'm fairly confident the cooling's working fine but I'm gonna commence overclocking and then we'll see.

The monitoring program I used was MSi Afterburner. Curiously, Core Temp seemed to cause explorer to crash and the Prime95 window closed after a bit of running even though the application was still going. Must be Windows 10.

 

[Xylophone]

I was wondering why the box didn't come with a stock cooler.
Well, I overclocked to 4.5GHz at 1.4V and under Prime95, temperatures seem to have stabilized at 74C. Seems a little high given that some people are reaching 4.8GHz.
Maybe my thermal pasting job was a little shoddy? Or could it be my CPU getting the short end of the silicon lottery?

Edit: I actually decided to Turbo Boost up to 4.5GHz instead because it meant not having to be at 1.4V even at idle but it raised temperatures to the border of 77C and 78C. I tried using auto voltage with the overclock but that actually brought temperatures to 80C.

 

[Xylophone]

Oh, thanks for the information! That really puts me more at ease. I think I'll have to wait for new bios versions to come out though because my bios seems to be missing a lot of the features I read about on overclocking guides. It's good to know all that though; I was worried I was doing something wrong. So it's possible to get similar or higher performance while producing less heat?

Edit: I reverted to non-overclock settings but the stable temperature seems to be 10C higher even though the minimum temperature was around the same as before at 20C. Is this some sort of "breaking in" behavior?

 

[Xylophone]

The only difference between testing 50C and 60C was the bios version, so I might look into that. I guess Windows power settings could have also caused the disparity. I have a Gigabyte mobo and I've been reading that their bios support has been kinda crap with the new Skylake boards but hopefully the F7 and higher bios will arrive soon. I did use a recent version of Prime95 like the temperature guide said so that might explain the high temps but it never crossed 80 and I think I'm gonna stop stress testing until Gigabyte provides an updated bios to flash and I can get a physical thermometer in this room. Since my overclock uses such a high 1.4V vcore, I'll just stick with the raised Turbo Boost since the CPU-Z vcore (I hear those are inaccurate though) never even approaches 1.35V and I'm probably never gonna need all 4.5GHz anyways. I'll just turn it off when I do anything like 3D rendering so I don't fry my CPU.

Thanks for all the help!