Cooling issues?

RedvGreen · 5 Mar 2011 at 15:38

5minutes in Prime95, temps continue to rise past 81'C on all 4 cores.

H50 Cooler with Arctic Silver 5 cooling i7 920 OC'd to 3.2GHz via Asus Rampage Extreme II Mobo automatic OC presets facility.

My system has been generally left unattended for over 15months (normally I upgrade every 6months).

Any ideas what may be the issue?

I was considering OCing instead of grabbing a Gulftown, however looking at these figures is pushing me down the upgrade route of:

BIOS Flash
i7 970 Gulftown six-core
H70 Cooler
IC Diamond 24carat

Tealc · 5 Mar 2011 at 15:57

Vcore 1.296v is a bit high for a D0 only running at 3370Mhz. I run my D0 at 1.1v and go to 3570Mhz.

1.296v is 4Ghz territory.

RedvGreen · 5 Mar 2011 at 16:04

Tealc said:
Vcore 1.296v is a bit high for a D0 only running at 3370Mhz. I run my D0 at 1.1v and go to 3570Mhz.

1.296v is 4Ghz territory.

Ah. This is a mobo preset overclock. It would be safe to assume that ASUS took the 'cover all bases' route and upped the Vcore to a very generous level to stop potential BSODs and errors, yet at the seeming cost of the CPU...

Edit: Vcore is currently 1.304v in idle...

Tealc · 5 Mar 2011 at 17:21

I think this is why people on here recommend setting your own o verclock in BIOS.

RedvGreen · 5 Mar 2011 at 17:24

I know now!

I'm finishing my thesis this evening, and will fix this later/tomorrow. Will update as necessary!

Cheers for your help

RedvGreen · 6 Mar 2011 at 17:39

Oh My God.

I took the computer apart, and found a virtual fabric layer of dust occupy every heatsink, fan and dustguard...

This is half cleaned at the time of the photo:

Yikes. No wonder it was reporting huge temps. Needless to say the PC is dust free now; and i've used 2 cans of compressed air in the process.