The Gaming PC Building/Upgrade Thread

[NJ5]

NJ5 said:

Holy dust bunnies batman!

I was worried that my CPU temperatures were too high (about 73 C under load on a Phenom II X6 2.8 GHz), I opened up the computer and there was a layer of dust between the heatsink and the CPU fan (not easy to see due to the angles of the fan blades).

I blew the dust out and the temperature under load dropped to around 51 C, more than a 20 C drop just from clearing out dust!

I was thinking of buying some Arctic Silver thermal paste, but I'm going to keep my money now...

 

Continuing my "cooling" stories, 51 C was a good enough temperature but I was starting to get sick of the noise from the stock CPU cooler, so I bought a Cooler Master Hyper 212 plus (what a mouthful) after reading reviews at silentpcreview.com

I had to remove and reinstall the motherboard in order to mount it, but it was totally worth it. After installing it and mucking around a bit with the "Smart Q-Fan" settings on my ASUS bios, CPU temperatures went down by another 10 degrees, but more importantly the computer got a whole lot quieter. The new fan is just barely above 1100 RPM when the computer is under load, whereas the stock fan, being much smaller, had to go near 4000 RPM or even 5000 depending on the ambient temperature.

I think I may get it even quieter by accepting slightly higher temperatures (there's nothing wrong with 50 C under load) and replacing the fan with a quiet Nexus fan. Then I may start worrying about the case fans which are probably the next biggest noise source.