Cooling issues on i5 2500K

FlyingPig · 6 Feb 2015 at 19:12

Hi,

I'm having some cooling issues and I'm wondering whether it is due to my overclock or the heatsink.
Note: I don't know much about this and I'm still trying to get to grips with the way everything is connected.
Basically, I'm running a 4 year old system built by OCUK. The only thing I have changed over the years is a GPU upgrade from a GTX 570 to a 970. Rest of my specs:

Motherboard P67A-GD53 (MS-7681)
i5 2500K CPU
OCZ PSU 700W Stealth Xtreme
8GB RAM

I never used to game much on the 570 but now that I have the 970 I've been playing some more demanding games, and I've been having the occasional reboot under stress. Thought it was a PSU issue but I'm inclined to think it is the CPU, and its overclock in particular.
Ever since upgrading to the GTX 970 I haven't really found a way in the upgraded BIOS to overclock my system like before so in the end I settled with the OC Genie software from MSI, which raises it to 4.2Ghz.
Anyway: here is the scary part, stress tested in Prime95 (max. heat)

(look at the max of 98 degrees C)

I reverted to stock and ran it again, and the temperatures seem more reasonable:

Is it fair to say I should look into the actual overclock? (tricky as to make the 970 work I had to upgrade the BIOS and on my old motherboard it then becomes hard to overclock anything apparently)
Or could it have something to do with the thermal paste on the CPU or the heatsink? Below is a picture of what OCUK put together all these years ago. I have never taken it off.

Looks like a decent cooler, no?

McGraw · 6 Feb 2015 at 19:29

The cooler could be failing now perhaps.

Can you check pump and fan rpm in hwmonitor?

wazza300 · 6 Feb 2015 at 20:13

blow all the **** out of the rad fins might help,take care not to bend/damage the fins

it should only be around the 70c mark imo

Finners · 6 Feb 2015 at 20:35

Is the fan speed increasing as the temperature goes up?

What headers do you have the fan and pumped plugged into?

FlyingPig · 7 Feb 2015 at 11:59

Fan speed increases as the temperature goes up. Not sure what you mean by headers.
Here is what HWMonitor is saying at stock speeds, idle, about an hour after playing some Battlefield 4. Temperatures got up to about 71C under load this morning.

Yesterday overclocked it went to over 80, and in the high 90's in this Prime95 stress test.
I need to get my hands on some compressed air and blow all that dust out (before only ever vacuumed), let's hope that'll be the end of it as I'm wary of taking that whole construction out and reapply thermal paste (never done it so I could make it worse, and ideally I'd want another 2-3 years out of this rig).
I never even knew this Corsair concoction was a pump, is this some kind of mix of watercooling and air cooling then?
Maybe I'll have a word with OcUK directly too as it was them who put this together but the overclock was never stable so I ended up running it at stock as a work machine, though would like to get back into gaming.

Telecaster · 7 Feb 2015 at 15:59

Voltage seems very high for only 4.2ghz, mine isn't a particularly good clocker and it only needs 1.32v for 4.5ghz. I forget what stock voltage is when turbo is active, but it seems high for that as well at 1.296v.

Even so, I'd be looking at the cooler, something isn't right, it shouldn't be getting that hot, I don't see over 70 degrees @ 4.5ghz in a small mITX case and air cooled.

Are you confident enough to remove parts and troubleshoot this yourself?

It's a fairly simple contraption, the pump is in the block that sits over the CPU, it pumps the water through the radiator where the fan cools it down, same as a car radiator. I'd be surprised if a bit of dust build up was causing 90 degree temps, but it's worth starting there.

modd1uk · 7 Feb 2015 at 18:23

Which way is that fan blowing on the rear?

FlyingPig · 7 Feb 2015 at 21:02

I still haven't cleaned anything so far but I think Telecaster may be on to something, maybe it's simply the voltage that was too high. I reset the BIOS to Optimized defaults and did some idle and stress testing to get a baseline (wish I had done all this 4 years ago but didn't have a clue back then). At idle it's sitting around 30-35C, 2 mins Prime blend test takes it to around 60C, 2 min max heat Prime test takes it to around 65C. Is that reasonable enough?
Then I decided to follow the advice from this interesting post on this forum: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=19374602&postcount=14 which is a whole thread on a similar issue, it seems. Basically a quick and dirty way to have a decent overclock on this chip and motherboard without too much hassle (simply change turbo settings on the 4 cores and leave everything else like it is).
Temperatures @4.2Ghz at idle were around 30-35C, Prime blend test 65-70C, Prime FFT max heat 64-73C. Voltage never above 1.3V.
So, that's progress I guess, and I learnt a lot in the meantime.
One thing I noticed when reverting to stock in BIOS is the CPU fan stays at 100% and sounds like a jet taking off, which is very annoying, but I've fiddled around enough now to have found Speedfan and it seems to have calmed down now. Still looking for a more user-friendly programme to control the fans as I want my PC as quiet as possible and for the "jet" only to take off during gaming.
Anyway, I'll see how it goes in the next few days and I'll start having a look at the actual cooler. I'm quite happy to have a go at taking it off if the risk is minimal, but in the meantime I'll keep an eye on the temperatures now that I have tweaked the overclock, as it seems the built-in MSI lazy way of doing it was at least part of the problem.
Thanks for all your input gents.

Telecaster · 8 Feb 2015 at 12:50

Glad you've made some progress and yes temps are much better, is there no fan control option in the BIOS? They aren't always labelled as fan control, it's sometimes under something like hardware control or something similar.

Still make sure you have a clean out and maybe look at a cheap dust filter, dust is a killer in more ways than just overheating.

Edit: Fan control is in the BIOS under H/W monitor, page 3-17 of the manual according to this:

http://uk.msi.com/support/mb/P67AGD53_B3.html#down-manual

Depending on the type of fans and where they're connected results in how much control you have.

Telecaster · 8 Feb 2015 at 13:03

Just checked for you, mine runs 4.2ghz @ 1.23 volts, it really is as simple as setting the ratio and changing the voltage in small increments until it's stable.

FlyingPig · 8 Feb 2015 at 13:10

Hi Telecaster,

Yeah, thanks, figured out in the meantime how to set them in the BIOS, which is useful. Seemed to work fine (spinning around 34% when just browsing the web, spinning 100% when gaming).
That is, until I was playing some Battlefield 4 campaign for a bit, with temps around 70-75C and all seemed fine, but after an hour I got ridiculous frame rate drops, to around 10FPS. Which would tie in with the CPU running too hot I think?
I got the hoover out and cleaned as much as I could, but I didn't see much dust. Then I had the brilliant idea to take off the cooler to have a look -- some pictures below:

Then reran the Prime test and temps under load are back to the high 90s. I guess because I took the cooler off and back on and didn't put any new thermal paste on?
I won't game any more until I have sorted this out (it's idling around 40C now so should be safe enough), so would my best course of action be to order some thermal paste and reapply it? As that's the likely cause, isn't it? (had a look at that cooler and it seems fine, no dust in between and fans spin normally from what I can see, 1800rpm at 100% HWMonitor is saying)

Telecaster · 8 Feb 2015 at 13:35

The thermal paste wasn't too bad TBH, it shows a contact patch horizontally inline with the die so I don't think that was the main reason for your issues, but yes, a clean and reapply of TIM and reseating the cooler can't hurt.

chroniclard · 8 Feb 2015 at 13:57

Mine hits about 72 degrees on prime, 1.35ish V, 4.4ghz on an air cooler. Good clean should probably sort it a bit.

Telecaster · 8 Feb 2015 at 16:27

Got me interested now, I just set it at 4.5ghz and left it at that, will go and do some testing and see what it will actually do.

Harl0 · 8 Feb 2015 at 17:41

Agreed - I these coolers do suffer massively when the fins are clogged.

FlyingPig · 8 Feb 2015 at 19:08

OK, ordered some compressed air and some Arctic Silver thermal paste. Ever since taking off the cooler to take a peak it's gotten worse, even just having Google Chrome open and playing a Flash video full screen ramps it up to 60-70C. Not good, so let's hope a good clean will sort it.
How would you go about this on this cooler: take the whole thing out or would it be possible to just blow air in it from the back, for the dust to fall into my case and then hoover it up? (bit of a pain to install apparently)
As for re-applying the paste: any consensus on here about what method to use? Pea method seems the most popular but I've never done it so might as well ask.

Telecaster · 8 Feb 2015 at 19:38

Pea or a small line in the direction of the die usually works for me, make sure you tighten it up in stages, don't just fully tighten up one corner at a time.