Help solving cooling mystery....

[suddie1215]

I completed a home build about four weeks ago consisting of the following:
Thermaltake Armor case
Intel Q6600 processor
Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P motherboard
8GB OCZ Reaper HPC Edition RAM
OCZ GameXStream 750W power supply
Western Digital 500GB hard drive (x 2)
Windows Vista Ultimate

Its been stable so far so I'd like to do an overclock to 3.0 GHz. In preparation I decided to swap out the stock heat sink and fan for an Artic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro. Prior to doing the swap I used both CoreTemp64 and RealTemp 3.0 to measure the temperatures and they both reported Idle temps of 32-32-25-30 and 62-62-56-57 under load (using Prime95 stress test).

After swapping the HSF yesterday, the Idle temps were 39-39-34-38. Thinking I'd done something incorrectly, this morning I removed the ACF 7 Pro and reinstalled it while making sure it was seated properly (I removed the motherboard from the case) and that the Artic Silver 5 was applied correctly.

Even after all these efforts the reported temps are higher than those with the stock Intel HSF...they are still reading 39-39-34-38 at idle and I didn't even bother stress testing. Is there something else I can be doing to lower the temps? I've already changed the BIOS settings to Enable (from Auto) and PWM.

Thanks for any advice.



P.S. the ambient temperature is the same and possibly a bit cooler than yesterday so I'm baffled why the supposedly better HSF isn't cooling as well as the stock HSF.

 

[calinkula]

Double check to make sure you up your fan speed settings in bios. If cooling doesn't improve I would start thinking of a faulty fan on the ACF 7 Pro. I couldn't imagine it lose to a stock Intel cooler unless there is some sort of problem.

 

[Conumdrum]

Agreed, you have done everything right. It could be a faulty heatsink. The heat tubes could be empty. It happens. And yes, there is stuff in them.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

There may be another factor involved. According to the Artic Silver web site it takes about 200 hours of operation for the thermal compound to cure and reach maximum performance.

 

[suddie1215]

Double check to make sure you up your fan speed settings in bios. If cooling doesn't improve I would start thinking of a faulty fan on the ACF 7 Pro. I couldn't imagine it lose to a stock Intel cooler unless there is some sort of problem.

Thanks for your response. I disabled the Auto option in BIOS which now means the fan is at max speed. With that setting my overnight temps are 35-35-30-33. While I didn't expect performance like a ThermalRight cooler, this is disappointed since I assume I could at least shave a few degrees off the stock cooler's temp readings.

I don't think its the fan; as Conumdrum pointed out...I'm inclined to believe the actual heatsink is faulty.

 

[suddie1215]

Agreed, you have done everything right. It could be a faulty heatsink. The heat tubes could be empty. It happens. And yes, there is stuff in them.

That would be unfortunate....I can RMA it to Newegg but I'd rather avoid that aggravation.

 

[suddie1215]

There may be another factor involved. According to the Artic Silver web site it takes about 200 hours of operation for the thermal compound to cure and reach maximum performance.

Yep, I'm aware of the AS5 burn-in period. But with all things being equal the AC7 should have lower temps than the stock cooler...temps don't lower much after burn-in.

 

[blackpanther26]

to determin if it is defected. You should stress it just to see the max temp.

 

[suddie1215]

to determin if it is defected. You should stress it just to see the max temp.

I'll try that right now.

 

[suddie1215]

After approx. 30 minutes of Stress testing with Prime95 (large FFT) here are my temp readings:

 

[blackpanther26]

somthing is not right with those temps. I have the Q9650 even though Thremals are different it never gose above 60c load with my Vigor Monsoon III LT cooler.