New Cooler Needed for i7 960 D0?

BillHicksRIP · 10 Jan 2017 at 18:00

Hi. Looking for some advice. I've had the rig below for about 5 years and it's only ever been used as an ESX host - never gamed on it or overclocked it. I want to turn it into a music production workstation but I'm not happy with the temps the current cooler is showing. At idle (with just music playing, for example), RealTemp is showing an average of 52c across the cores. When I'm using a heavy VSTi in Ableton, the temps head into the 70's causing the CPU to throttle and the output from Ableton to go choppy and drop out.

From what I can tell, this CPU should still be able to cut it with music, especially with an overclock to 3.8Ghz+ but I need to sort the cooling out. All slots on board are filled and the memory is running at 1066 due to running 24GB on this board. Happy to drop that to 12GB if I can run the memory at a higher speed.

My question, is should I be looking at a new cooler or try and figure out why this one is not cooling as well as I thought it would? The board is running with optimised defaults currently. Budget is up to £100 if I can squeeze more performance out of this rig for a while.

Intel Core i7 960 3.20Ghz (Nehalem) (Socket LGA1366) - Retail
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Intel X58 (Socket 1366) DDR3 Motherboard
Corsair Vengeance 12GB (3x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Triple Channel Kit x2 (24GB)
Fractal Design Define XL Full Tower Case - Black Pearl
Corsair Enthusiast Series TX 650W V2 High Performance Power Supply (CMPSU-650TXV2)
Corsair Hydro H50-1 High-Performance CPU Watercooler (Socket LGA775115511561366AM2AM3)
Akasa AK-FN058 Apache Black Super Silent 120mm Fan - 4 Pin PWM
Windows 10 Pro

Thanks for looking.

doyll · 10 Jan 2017 at 18:32

While your CPU temps are not great, they could bed much better, expecially at that low an OC. What is your case airflow setup?
I don't think it's your CPU that's throttling. i7 960 doesn't throttle until close to 100c.
I have a couple of GA-X58A -xxxx boards, but never used their built in audio as I have audio cards with much higher specs. Maybe that is what is overheating and throttling.
I'm not sure about using 3x DDR3 wiht 2x triple channel kit either. All of mine use 3x matched sticks. I can understand 12GB RAM not being enough, but do you need 36GB RAM? |Or would 24GB be enough?

BillHicksRIP · 10 Jan 2017 at 18:54

It's running at stock at the moment (3.2Ghz) with no overclock at all. The goal would be to get it to 3.8-4 if I could. The built-in audio card is disabled as I use an external soundcard. The max memory for the board is 24GB which it has at the moment. 3 x 4GB x 2. I mentioned dropping it back to 12GB, which should be fine, as I believe I'll be able to run the RAM at higher than 1066, which is what it's at currently. There's also the question of some of the larger heatsinks being unable to be used if all slots are full due to space constraints so happy to take the hit on available RAM if I can overclock the CPU sufficiently.

doyll · 10 Jan 2017 at 20:02

Okay, I misunderstood your RAM. But things still don't make sense. I'm not familiar with Ableton, but i7 960s' do not throttle in the 70's, so why is your audio getting choppy? Are you doing everything on system software or are live streaming?

chickadee · 10 Jan 2017 at 21:46

Things getting choppy seems weird. Maybe it would be wise to grab a PCIe soundcard if your going to be dealing with audio, my guess is the reason its choppy is a driver problem and nothing to do with temps.

Those are rather high though. Also if you didn't know you can grab a Intel xeon X5650 from ebay for about £50 which will give you 2 extra cores is that would help you (not sure how demanding audio is).

BillHicksRIP · 10 Jan 2017 at 22:25

Thanks for the replies. I've solved the choppy/crackling problem by backing off the latency settings for the soundcard. Multiple tracks and effects play fine now but I let it run for 20 minutes and temps hit 84c before I stopped it. This is at stock, which suggests I've got no chance of an overclock with the current set up.

chickadee · 11 Jan 2017 at 06:45

BillHicksRIP said:
Thanks for the replies. I've solved the choppy/crackling problem by backing off the latency settings for the soundcard. Multiple tracks and effects play fine now but I let it run for 20 minutes and temps hit 84c before I stopped it. This is at stock, which suggests I've got no chance of an overclock with the current set up.

If you want a performance boost + a cooler chip that has a very easy time overclocking head over here:

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18618052

You can grab one on ebay for about 50-60 and then grab a half decent cooler from OCUK and you should be good to go with 6cores/12 thread @ 4.2ghz.

Thats my suggestion if you require a performance boost with your £100 budget.

DarkHorizon472 · 12 Jan 2017 at 20:45

Is the cpu heat sync fitted properly ?

Might be worth getting some new quality paste, cleaning it and reseating it using the new paste.

Also possibly case fans but just be careful spending more than you need.

ubersonic · 13 Jan 2017 at 23:13

BillHicksRIP said:
At idle (with just music playing, for example), RealTemp is showing an average of 52c across the cores. When I'm using a heavy VSTi in Ableton, the temps head into the 70's

That is actually quite normal for a Corsair H50 considering the CPU/clocks, you have to remember that this is a design from early 2008 and although it's been changed over the years the updates have only been cosmetic (aside from fans).

Back when it was first re-released under the Corsair brand it was tested on an i7 920 clocked at 3.5Ghz and did 42/70 idle/load.

How many fans do you have on it? Fitting a second has been shown to improve load temps by over five degrees (also higher performance fans help depending on how old it is and what type it came with).