Glaciator Not Doing Its Job

[Eil Atan]

hey all, I was travelling around so I haven't posted in quite a while, but I am back at home with my new glaciator and it doesn't seem to working up to its potential... the temperature of the chip is at 40C idle, which seems a bit high for this cooler, although it is 10C cooler than using my FOP 32-1... I felt the glaciator and a lot of air is being pushed out, and the HS itself feels relatively cool. my first thought was that it isn't making good contact with the processor, but I tried taking it off and reattaching it and that didn't help... any thoughts?

 

[Eil Atan]

hmm... strange.. at load, the temp is only 41C or 42C... that doesn't seem to make much sense, i would expect more of a discrepency between load and idle, at least more than 2C... thanks for any help...

 

[William]

the mbm monitor temps for the glaciator are not very accurate as they can be as much as 5C too hot.

 

[Eil Atan]

so my motherboard is probably reading it incorrectly?

 

[William]

yeah, and I also notice you have an Asus mobo, you using Asus probe on that? Because Asus probe will read around 10C too hot.

 

[MGTasco]

Eil Atan (Jul 24, 2001 08:58 p.m.):
hey all, I was travelling around so I haven't posted in quite a while, but I am back at home with my new glaciator and it doesn't seem to working up to its potential... the temperature of the chip is at 40C idle, which seems a bit high for this cooler, although it is 10C cooler than using my FOP 32-1... I felt the glaciator and a lot of air is being pushed out, and the HS itself feels relatively cool. my first thought was that it isn't making good contact with the processor, but I tried taking it off and reattaching it and that didn't help... any thoughts?

My own test with digital thermometers shows that the Glaciator has about 0.26C/W so if you expect it to perform miraculously good in the first place, then you will be dissapointed.

But your idle and full load temperature seems to be too close. There are only 3 possibilities for this
1) Your thermistor is not reading correctly
2) Your idle is not really idle
3) Your full load is not really full load.

Chances is item 1 or 2 could be the suspect. When idle, make sure there is really nothing running behind your background, no anti-virus, no icq, no screensaver..preferably when you do a cntrl-alt-del, the dialog window only shows systray and explorer. Many people has a string of things on their taskbar and take idle as "not doing anything on their part". So do be careful of that.

If you are sure that your comp is really idle, then your mobo thermistor is not reading correctly.

 

[Eil Atan]

william: i am using asus probe, so it probably isn't reading too accurately...

mgtasco: my idle wasn't really idle... i am pretty sure my load is correct though, and i guess the problem is more rooted in the fact that my asus probe isn't very accurate...

 

[William]

Asus probe is not accurate at all, it is notorious for reading 10C too hot. The Glaciator CAN skew results by as much as 5C although not usually that bad. You should be able to overclock more with the Glaciator though.

 

[sentania]

how does the Glaciator in particular SKEW results?

 

[William]

sentania (Jul 26, 2001 02:07 p.m.):
how does the Glaciator in particular SKEW results?

ed had a long article on how really any heatsink can SKEW results. The trouble is that you are monitoring temps from the back of your cpu, which isn't accurate to begin with. If you look at Joe's test at oc.com he got a .20 c/w for the glaciator using the method that AMD says should be used to accurately measure temps, which is drilling a hole for a thermocouple a millimeter or two above the CPU core. You can get very similar results by using as epoxy and attaching a thermocouple to the raised side of a core. In both instances you see that MBM gives temps about 5C higher than those two more accurate ways. Asus probe is well known to put every temp reading around 10C too hot. I will try to bump up the thread for you to see.

 

[Eil Atan]

that sounds pretty sensible... i didn't think that measuring from the back would be a very accurate way of monitoring temps, and my chip feels much cooler than Asus Probe is reporting it as...