New PC

[Panagiotis Raris]

thats odd; i have been running perfectly stable speeds and temps with my (mATX) home rig...

mATX case with side removed
Asus Rampage III Gene mobo
Corsair XMS3 running at 1600Mhz or higher
i7 950 at 3.78 or 3.88 Ghz
Corsair H50 water/air cooler
80mm fans blowing onto the northbridge and southbridge
80mm fans blowing across a 4 2.5" RAID0 array

58C on the southbridge is my highest temp running prime95 for 5 hours.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Randall Leong

I took the heatsink off, and discovered that the thermal paste did not spread evenly. The center of the CPU got much less paste than the edges despite me using a single line down the center (vertically). This led me to believe that the heatsink was not sitting perfectly flat on the CPU no matter what I tried: The parts that got more thermal paste actually have poor contact with the heatsink.

And yes, I was forced to use Arctic Silver V because I ran out of the Noctua paste, and I could not find it in the stores that I frequently shop at. AS5 requires as much as a 200-hour curing time (this means that the system must be powered on and off during this period, in increments of several hours).

By the way, Craig, what program did you use for temperature readings? I use RealTemp, which supposedly reads the temperatures on each individual core. And RealTemp usually reads higher than many other temperature monitoring programs.

I will be placing an order for the Noctua paste next week. I tested another i7 build (my old i7-920 with an Intel-brand board) - and this time using a new Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus heatsink. It turned out that the Arctic Silver 5 that I was using didn't work well enough with many of the newer tower heatsinks. The i7-950 with the Noctua NH-U12P SE2 heatsink and Arctic Silver 5 allowed the CPU to reach the upper 60s C even at stock - nearly as high as the same CPU achieved with the stock boxed Intel CPU cooler with its originally applied compound. The Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus with its supplied thermal compound only allowed the CPU to reach the mid-50s C at stock, and barely touched 60°C even overclocked to 3.5GHz. I will be testing further at higher overclocks with my auxiliary rig.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Randall Leong

The Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus with its supplied thermal compound only allowed the CPU to reach the mid-50s C at stock, and barely touched 60°C even overclocked to 3.5GHz. I will be testing further at higher overclocks with my auxiliary rig.

I spoke a tad soon there. I had to set the CPU fan to always spin at full speed in order to achieve this level of performance. With the CPU fan speed set in the motherboard BIOS to the default AUTO, the CPU temperature increased by nearly 10°C - to nearly 70°C. The small amount of silence I gained (since the motherboard's northbridge fan emits a constant high-pitched whine) could not make up for the significant increase in CPU temperature.