CPU cooling advice

[aeiou]

Hey guys its been a really long time since I really looked at home air moves around my case and getting the best CPU cooling I can, so I could use some advice.

Heres what I have for my system:

i5 4590 @3.3ghz (stock for now) - Just bought a Cooler master Hyper 212 EVO for this
8GB corsair vengence DDR3
MSI GTX 960
EVGA 142-HR-E977 Z97 motherboard

I've been playing around with the airflow going around the system, but nothing I do seems to make much of any difference. With the stock cooler I was getting about 30C idle and about 65C load. With the new cooler it really doesn't look that much different - the best I've seen under load is about 60-63C. I am using the TIM that came with the cooler, and thinking that a better TIM would probably help, but I'm not sure it would be that big a difference. I also thought that maybe I used too much paste the first time I applied it, but I took it off and re-applied it with less, tempertures were the same afterwards. I did also used to have both top case fans exhausting and I thought I would try fipping the front around to bring cool air directly to the CPU cooler. It didn't seem to make much of a difference. I'm also including a picture to give you an idea. Any sugestions on optimizing this setup? Best thoughts on the type of TIM to apply?

BTW I cannot turn the cooler 90 degrees so that the fan points up because it hits the RAM when I do that.

 

[Janus67]

I would switch the top fan that is blowing in back to out, it is better as an exhaust fan otherwise you're just making turbulence in the case for no real gain and pushing hot air back down. Other than that your temps are fine and about what I would expect out of an Evo I would say. You also didn't mention what your ambient (room) temperature was so it's hard to make a comparison.

Regarding TIM I believe the Coolermaster stuff is supposed to be decent, but ultimately I wouldn't expect more than a few C from best to worst.

Here's a quick chart on various brands/types of TIM that you can look into:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/thermal-paste-performance-benchmark,3616-19.html

They have a separate article for application.

I know there's another commonly referred to post with a ton of comparisons too but I don't have it bookmarked.



Also, added your 10-year badge, congratulations!

 

[ATMINSIDE]

What's your front fan arrangement?

 

[aeiou]

@ ATMINSIDE there are 2 120's blowing in (the 2 vectors on the bottom right of the pic)

@ Janus67 That makes sense. I will switch it back around, like I said it didnt really seem to make a difference either way. It was odd to me though that I didn't really see any difference compared to the stock cooler. It is a little warm in here right now with the heat on, its probably at least 68F ambient.

 

[Janus67]

68F ambient isn't too bad. You're probably getting some of the heat from the GPU just letting the hot air rise into the CPU, not much you can really do about that. I would have to look up some reviews for 212 Evos again to see what expected temperature/deltas are supposed to be (been too long) to have a comparison to know what you should be seeing.

 

[aeiou]

Well I just checked the thermostat downstairs says it was 68 there and it has to be at least 10 degrees warmer in here... time to crack a window and close the vent

- - - Updated - - -

@ Janus67 what if I moved the GPU down to one of the lower pic-e slots so that its further from the CPU? Maybe the it wouldn't be blocking airflow from one of the front fans too?

 

[Janus67]

That's worth a shot, either way the air will have to rise out though and it will go past the CPU cooler and get blown out. May make a C or two difference. Ultimately your temps aren't too shabby at full load to be honest, I'd be curious to see how well it handles some overclocking if you decide to go that route (although yours is a locked chip anyway)

 

[EarthDog]

@ Janus67 what if I moved the GPU down to one of the lower pic-e slots so that its further from the CPU? Maybe the it wouldn't be blocking airflow from one of the front fans too?

Make sure the slot you move it to is 8x, otherwise you will lose a decent amount of performance on your GPU if its in a 4x slot (several % IIRC).

 

[aeiou]

For Sure @ EarthDog i've got 4 8x slots I believe this board can handle quad sli. Thanks for the advice guys I might try a little light overclocking.

 

[EarthDog]

I do not know how it breaks down with a single card in a different slot...: 4x PCI Express 3.0 x16 Slots (Single at x16; dual at x8/x8; triple at x8/x4/x4; quad at x8/x4/x4/x1). I think you are in good shape regardless. Just verify with GPUz that it is 8x.

 

[aeiou]

Its going now, this CPU is actually unlocked, I have it at 100x35 for a 200mhz OC. Running prime95 right now we are hovering between 68-70C on the core. We'll see how stable it is. I didn't make the GPU change yet.

 

[aeiou]

another quick thought... are most people still using speedFan for temp monitoring or is there something better these days? I didn't see anything in particular available from EVGA for it.

 

[Janus67]

Most people use either CoreTemp, realtemp, or hwmonitor

 

[aeiou]

So I realized that I probably wasn't being entirely fair to my new CPU cooler. I was comparing the temputrues I had before on the stock cooler that I was running video encoding on, compared to Prime95 max heat torture test, which probably makes the CPU quite a bit hotter.

I'm sitting now at a decent overclock of 35 x102 for 3.6Ghz, about 75C on the Small FFT max heat torture test. Also thanks for the thought on the PCI slots it turned out the one I tried was in fact limited to 4x even though its a full length slot so it went back into the top slot. Moving it didn't really seem to make a difference for heat anyway. Just doing some stress testing now

 

[doyll]

You might find this little tutorial on case airflow interesting.
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/...nd-Lighting-Suggestions?p=7678268#post7678268