Phenom II X4 820 - typical temps?

Hi folks,
I've recently upgraded a system with this chip and an MSI 880GMA-E45 mobo. CPU cooling is with a CM hyper 212+ with a single stock fan. This is mounted in a case that has a case fan directing incoming air about 2" from the HSF fan which I oriented to direct air flow in the same direction, of course! The HSF was installed using Artic Silver 5.

I have enabled Cool 'n Quite in the BIOS though I don't know if that matters when running Linux. (Please speak up if you know the answer to this question!)

With the Linux sensors package and the k10temp module installed, I get a single temperature. At idle, it reads about 15°C. I have this in a cool room, but if I had to guess room temp, I'd say about 60°F (59°F) That seems awfully close. But perhaps the room really is colder.

The actual display from 'sensors' looks like:

Question #1: What temperature rise (over ambient) should I expect using that cooling setup with an idle CPU?

After running four instances of burnMMX (to drive all four cores to 100%) the indicated temperature is at 36.5°C.

Question #2: What temperature rise over ambient should I expect for fully loaded CPU?

I plan to proceed with a mild to moderate overclock of this system. Before I do, I'd like to have some idea of whether this temperature indicator is reasonable or wildly inaccurate.

Note: When I go into the BIOS, the indicated temps are about 10°C higher than what I see following boot up.

thanks,
hank

to the Overclockers.com forum .

Not sure if this is your case but on my 1090T the on chip diode is way off, right around 15C. With ambient around 20C (68F) the chip reads ~15C (59F) @ idle (with CnQ enabled). At load it reads ~38C (~100F) @ 3.8Ghz. My guess is your chip will hit the wall ~40C (104F) as mine did, regardless of more voltage.

I would try a remount of the cooler first just to see if perhaps it's not making good contact and if the temps remain the same then the on chip diode is probably to low by ~10-15C.

Edit: don't remount, don't know what I was thinking here.

One good thing is when overclocking these you don't have to worry about heat too much cause they just error, BSOD, etc. Just careful of voltage 1.5V or less on air. If increasing the voltage .025V doesn't allow a higher clock then you probably reached the thermal limit.

Thanks for the tips. I was just going to say I wasn't going to remount the heat sink because that's awkward to do once the mobo is in the case. And since I'm not dealing with excessive temps it seems not necessary. Since temperature is not likely to be the limiting factor, I needn't worry about how accurate the temperature measurement is.

Thanks also for the chart you link to in your sig.

-hank

With the CPU at idle and CnQ turned on (assuming it's working) I wouldn't expect temps much more than 2-3° above ambient. Having said that, with the stock cooler I'd expect the core temp and CPU temp (incl BIOS reading) to be the same, however, BIOS will not use CnQ while it's running but the OS might, which can also be a huge factor.

Another thing often not considered: the board is relaying the temp from the CPU to the monitoring program. Unfortunately, some board/program combinations result in bad readings so it's not always the CPU that's at fault.


CnQ should work in Linux, too, but it does require drivers and I don't know if they would load with the rest of the Linux drivers at installation or not.