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How hot is too hot?

How hot is too hot?
« on: July 13, 2009, 06:02:38 pm »
I've  recently built a system around a GA-MA790FXT-UD5P botherboard with a Phenom II X4 955BE. I bought an Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro 64 cooler to go with it, but it overhung the first DIMM slot and since I am using all 4 slots (8GB RAM installed) I've had to use the stock AMD cooler. I was surprised by the cooler when I pulled it out of the box. Its a compact unit with a copper and alloy base and lots of closely packed fins mounted to the based plus four heat pipes which take heat from the base to the outer ends of the fins. This is topped off with a 70mm PWM controlled fan.

When lightly loaded EasyTune6 is reporting the temperature typcially in the high 30's DegC (around 95-100 DegF) which is far cooler than my previos Atlon XP 2000+ (around 55-60DegC - 130-140DegF). I would be really pleased with this, except EasyTune's default alarm level is 40DegC (101DegF) which means, according to EasyTune the processor is running on the limit of its working temperature range. If I start to make the PC work the temperature goes into the low 40's DegC (100-110DegF) and the alarm would go off if I had it enabled. I've tried disabling SmartFan so the fan runs flat out all the time, but the temperature doesn't change by a noticable amount. Enabling everything in EasySaver to get the CPU power down as low as possible also doesn't have a huge effect on the temperature. More surprisingly, a warm room doesn't make a huge difference either. With the room around a normal level of 21DegC (70DegF) the CPU is around 36-38DegC (96-100DegF). When we had a warm spell and the room temp went up to around 30DegC (86DegF) the CPU only went up to about 41DegC (105DegF). I also briefly tried upping the CPU multiplier to see what happened. I increased from the stock 16x to 20x (upping the core clock from 3.2GHz to 4GHz) for a few minutes just to see what happened. The PC ran quite happily like that and I found the CPU temperature only increased a couple of degrees (about 4DegF) during those few minutes, although I wasn't doing anything too processor intensive at the time.

What I would like to know, if anyone can help, is whether EasyTune is being over cautions with its settings? What sort of temperature the CPU can safely run to without affecting its reliability or life? Obviously the cooler the better, but how hot can I let the CPU get before I start worrying about it? I'm not intending to overclock more than a small amount (if at all) and would appreciate any comments you have about the temperature when overclocking compared to running at stock speeds.

Many thanks

Beekeeper

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Re: How hot is too hot?
« Reply #1 on: July 20, 2009, 04:05:11 pm »
What I would like to know, if anyone can help, is whether EasyTune is being over cautions with its settings? What sort of temperature the CPU can safely run to without affecting its reliability or life?

seems EasyTune is set too safe there, as the max temp for this CPU is 62 C, so anything below should be OK.
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Re: How hot is too hot?
« Reply #2 on: July 27, 2009, 09:29:03 pm »
Many thanks. Its good to know that it is set too sensitive At least I can now reset it to a reasonable level and turn the alarm on. I might even be able to play with the speeds a little without having to fit a monster cooler...

Something for the Gigabyte team. I have found the utilities shipped with my board are not only out of date, but as far as I can tell a bit buggy. The version of EasyTune supplied misreported by AM3 processor as AM2+ (very minor - CPUz does the same), the sliders on the Smart tab for manually tuning the fan speed aren't right as the high speed line goes to a 100% mark at the left of scale when it should go to the right, and the HW monitor page does not update (at all). I also have my doubts that Easy Energy Saver was reporting things correctly. I have downloaded and updated both to the latest versions from the Gigabyte website (Gigabyte.com.tw) and they are much, much better, but it is not good that the board was shipped with out of date software to begin with. My GV-R467D3-512I graphics card also came with old software that appeared to have a couple of problems.

Oh, its good how the 'experts' are leaving it to the newbies to answer the questions ::) ;)

oggmonster

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Re: How hot is too hot?
« Reply #3 on: July 29, 2009, 11:42:42 am »
If you're happy with your overclock then leave it. But I personally prefer doing all overclocking in the BIOS. Isn't as user friendly but is certainly more customisable.
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Re: How hot is too hot?
« Reply #4 on: July 30, 2009, 07:25:11 pm »
I'm a total newbie to overclocking so I'm really only experimenting at the moment. I'm back at stock speeds at the moment and the only settings I've tweaked in the BIOS are for the memory (Corsair 1600MHz DDR3) and I'm happy to stick with that for the moment. More pressing is getting the system working at stock speeds without the SCSI bus reset problems I've been plagued with since building the system. Once I get over those problems (which I suspect will involve doing away with the SCSI system) and get a stable starting point I'll be able to play around with overclocking a bit more and see what I can achieve whilst keeping the chip & system temperatures down at a reasonable level.

oggmonster

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Re: How hot is too hot?
« Reply #5 on: July 31, 2009, 12:46:16 pm »
Hmm I have very little expierience with SCSI so I can't really help you there  ???

Did you update to latest BIOS?
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Re: How hot is too hot?
« Reply #6 on: July 31, 2009, 08:19:37 pm »
First thing I did. I'm currently running F5 which was the most current when I started, although I will check and see if there are any more updates.

I thought I'd already gone through the problem here, but I'm getting confused. That was on the offical Windows 7 forum, so I'm going to start a new one in the motherboard section to see if anyone here has any ideas.

runn3R

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Re: How hot is too hot?
« Reply #7 on: August 05, 2009, 02:27:33 pm »
(...)
Something for the Gigabyte team. I have found the utilities shipped with my board are not only out of date, but as far as I can tell a bit buggy. (...)

Thanks Mark for your input, this will be reported to appropriate ppl for improvement. Anyway regarding utilities I always recommend using newest versions taken from Gigabyte website (http://www.giga-byte.co.uk).
« Last Edit: August 05, 2009, 02:35:40 pm by runn3R »
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Re: How hot is too hot?
« Reply #8 on: August 11, 2009, 11:07:53 pm »
Runn, a very wise recommendation and something I check whenever I get a new piece of hardware. I also check periodically (when I remember) to see if things get updated.

I am already using the latest downloads from the website, but in one area I think I'm still out of date, or at least I'm uncertain if it is right or not. The southbridge drivers supplied with the board (v8.522) state they cover the 700, 710 and 750 chipsets, whilst the version listed for the MA790FXT-UD5P on the website (v8.561) does not say which chips it supports and also appears to incude some form of display driver and ATi Catalyst software, which isn't relevant to the board I've got. I've tried both southbridge drivers and they both appear to work fine with the 790, but regardless of which I use I'm not 100% sure I've got the best drivers for the job as I don't know if they are actually designed for this chipset.