- Joined
- Nov 25, 2001
- Location
- Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada
Hail Team-mates,
Summer is coming, that's no news, seems to happen every year. Every year though, it seems like it takes us by surprise, rigs lock up, overclocks go down, production is lost. So this time, we're gonna remember the 6 "P"s
Proper
Planning
Prevents
P***
Poor
Performance!
This thread will be our secret weapon. Link in every cheap and effective cooling idea you come across on these forums and elsewhere.
This summer, we stand our ground. This summer, we beat the heat. This summer we will be prepared. This summer OCAU will not get away from us. This summer we will gain on [H]. This summer we dig in early and prepare positions. This summer is OUR summer.
Part I Making the most of what you've got
i) Work up a schedule for checking and oiling your fans. Maybe you have a favourite oil, maybe you don't. Don't use WD40 for anything but freeing them up if they're really gummy, it's mostly a solvent, apply real oil afterwards. Use any light-medium weight oil you find convenient. 3in1, sewing machine oil, light machine oil, 5w30 or 10w30 motor oil, roller blade oil, RC car bearing oil, all perform well. A handy oiler can be obtained from an old tape head or floppy disk cleaning kit, nab the little bottle the cleaning fluid came in, pop the top off, fill it with the drainings of a quart bottle of motor oil after you top up your vehicle, enlarge the hole slightly with a safety pin, then you're good to go for dispensing pinpoint drops of oil for dozens of fans.
ii) Keep your sinks dust free. A coating of dust insulates your sinks and makes them inefficient. Check them at the same time as you check your fans. Cleaning methods include; The favourite, blast with canned air. A refinement, blast with canned air towards a running vacuum cleaner so it doesn't end up back in your rig in a day or two. Or use the blower hose on the vacuum with a thin nozzle, if it has one. Or use a compressed air tank. Or remove the sinks and run them under the shower or faucet. Or use a paintbrush to dust with towards a vacuum. Use any method you can think of, but keep them clean. If you have them off to clean, remember, apply fresh TIM, the best you've got.
iii) Airflow Airflow Airflow. Take a moment or two in any of your boxen that are cased, to tidy up wires, interface cables etc, so that air can flow freely through the rig.
Remember Taking rigs down gracefully for a short while to do these, is less harmful to production than having them lock up for several days in a row before you figure out what the problem is!
iv) Lower your clocks in advance of hot weather! If you KNOW or suspect your rigs are going to lock up when the ambient temperature rises past a certain point. like if you're running 50C now in 20C ambients, then in advance of the hot weather, lower your clocks until you have enough heat headroom. A CPU at 2.6Ghz that locks up 3 times a week from heat, is losing about half of it's work due to spoiled and discarded units. Therefore it's only doing as much good as a 1.3Ghz CPU. Put your OC ego on the shelf for the heatwaves, lower the clock to a point where you know you've got the headroom. 2.2Ghz produces wayyyyy more than a 2.6 that locks up. Take advantage of any utils that let you lower your FSB or multi on the fly, make batch files to make it easy, if you're Christoph, write a perl script that gets temps from accuweather and have it adjust your clocks accordingly
... more on that sort of thing in Part II
iv) Insurance. Do everything you can to make sure your rig can survive a screwup. Try settings checkpoints in the client settings to every 5 mins so you lose less work if it manages to recover after a lock. Consider using system agent or something similar to backup your F@H directory every hour or so. So that's the maximum you ever lose.
Part II Improving, tuning, tweaking, adding cooling....
Add cheap mods to this list.
i) Software possibilities. Added here because it's more technical, needs a lot of messing with, and may need registered versions of some proggies to work best. MBM5 can launch programs triggered on temperature. This could be a batch file to step up or step down your FSB or Multiplier with a util such as CPUMSR or GCPUID. CPUCool also has various functions that may prove useful in this regard. Step it down before heat takes it down. I believe also that The Coolest is working on a version of GCPUID or maybe a whole new app, that allows temperature triggered multiplier switching. CPUFSB is a FSB only version of CPUcool that you might find more convenient to trigger with MBM5. SoftFSB may be better for some older motherboards. SpeedFan is another util with potentials to be used here. Time scheduling utils could also be used if you have regular hot/cool cycle, like temps always peak between 2pm-8pm and cool off between, or maybe the 'rents only run the AC a few hours every evening.
ii) Power. Wall power can be extra glitchy on hot days in the summer, due to higher usage load by aircons, fridges etc and by transformers and substations overheating etc. Aquiring even a modest sized UPS may help your rigs ride out the numerous breif glitches and brownouts. Failing that, if you've got any oversized PSUs hanging around or see some very cheap, consider using them on your folding rigs that are struggling along on the 250 or 300W ATXes that you had spare at the time. They will ride out minor glitches better with a larger PSU in. Also you will help to avoid overheating issues with maxed out PSUs. So if you've got a 550W hanging round waiting for something, let it wait in one of your folding rigs over the summer.
iii) Big packets hammer your RAM, if you've volted it and FSBed it to the limit, this inexpensive and ingeneous cooling device by Felinuz may be your answer to summer stability....
http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=350891
iv) The magic of blowers, add a new lease of life to any old heatsink, get c/w figures as good as some waterblocks, get VERY IMPRESSIVE air cooling results for very little outlay....
http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=370365
v) Ducting, you might only have so much airflow, but getting it to the right places is crucial. Experiment with cardboard and tape, implement more permanently if you prefer. Fresh air to the CPU fan intake is always a way to improve high temperature stability without having to replace a case with mediocre airflow characteristics with something spendy, or fit it with the equivalent of a Boeing 747's amount of static thrust in fans. One extra fan in the right place might do more than two more random intakes and exhausts.
vi) add threads here. Post all threads with inexpensive, highly efficient (bang per buck) cooling mods.
Q: ummm, "and win"?
A: You "win" we "win" the whole Team "wins" with better cooling this summer.
"Dig them in", and keep them folding,
Road Warrior
Summer is coming, that's no news, seems to happen every year. Every year though, it seems like it takes us by surprise, rigs lock up, overclocks go down, production is lost. So this time, we're gonna remember the 6 "P"s
Proper
Planning
Prevents
P***
Poor
Performance!
This thread will be our secret weapon. Link in every cheap and effective cooling idea you come across on these forums and elsewhere.
This summer, we stand our ground. This summer, we beat the heat. This summer we will be prepared. This summer OCAU will not get away from us. This summer we will gain on [H]. This summer we dig in early and prepare positions. This summer is OUR summer.
Part I Making the most of what you've got
i) Work up a schedule for checking and oiling your fans. Maybe you have a favourite oil, maybe you don't. Don't use WD40 for anything but freeing them up if they're really gummy, it's mostly a solvent, apply real oil afterwards. Use any light-medium weight oil you find convenient. 3in1, sewing machine oil, light machine oil, 5w30 or 10w30 motor oil, roller blade oil, RC car bearing oil, all perform well. A handy oiler can be obtained from an old tape head or floppy disk cleaning kit, nab the little bottle the cleaning fluid came in, pop the top off, fill it with the drainings of a quart bottle of motor oil after you top up your vehicle, enlarge the hole slightly with a safety pin, then you're good to go for dispensing pinpoint drops of oil for dozens of fans.
ii) Keep your sinks dust free. A coating of dust insulates your sinks and makes them inefficient. Check them at the same time as you check your fans. Cleaning methods include; The favourite, blast with canned air. A refinement, blast with canned air towards a running vacuum cleaner so it doesn't end up back in your rig in a day or two. Or use the blower hose on the vacuum with a thin nozzle, if it has one. Or use a compressed air tank. Or remove the sinks and run them under the shower or faucet. Or use a paintbrush to dust with towards a vacuum. Use any method you can think of, but keep them clean. If you have them off to clean, remember, apply fresh TIM, the best you've got.
iii) Airflow Airflow Airflow. Take a moment or two in any of your boxen that are cased, to tidy up wires, interface cables etc, so that air can flow freely through the rig.
Remember Taking rigs down gracefully for a short while to do these, is less harmful to production than having them lock up for several days in a row before you figure out what the problem is!
iv) Lower your clocks in advance of hot weather! If you KNOW or suspect your rigs are going to lock up when the ambient temperature rises past a certain point. like if you're running 50C now in 20C ambients, then in advance of the hot weather, lower your clocks until you have enough heat headroom. A CPU at 2.6Ghz that locks up 3 times a week from heat, is losing about half of it's work due to spoiled and discarded units. Therefore it's only doing as much good as a 1.3Ghz CPU. Put your OC ego on the shelf for the heatwaves, lower the clock to a point where you know you've got the headroom. 2.2Ghz produces wayyyyy more than a 2.6 that locks up. Take advantage of any utils that let you lower your FSB or multi on the fly, make batch files to make it easy, if you're Christoph, write a perl script that gets temps from accuweather and have it adjust your clocks accordingly
... more on that sort of thing in Part II iv) Insurance. Do everything you can to make sure your rig can survive a screwup. Try settings checkpoints in the client settings to every 5 mins so you lose less work if it manages to recover after a lock. Consider using system agent or something similar to backup your F@H directory every hour or so. So that's the maximum you ever lose.
Part II Improving, tuning, tweaking, adding cooling....
Add cheap mods to this list.
i) Software possibilities. Added here because it's more technical, needs a lot of messing with, and may need registered versions of some proggies to work best. MBM5 can launch programs triggered on temperature. This could be a batch file to step up or step down your FSB or Multiplier with a util such as CPUMSR or GCPUID. CPUCool also has various functions that may prove useful in this regard. Step it down before heat takes it down. I believe also that The Coolest is working on a version of GCPUID or maybe a whole new app, that allows temperature triggered multiplier switching. CPUFSB is a FSB only version of CPUcool that you might find more convenient to trigger with MBM5. SoftFSB may be better for some older motherboards. SpeedFan is another util with potentials to be used here. Time scheduling utils could also be used if you have regular hot/cool cycle, like temps always peak between 2pm-8pm and cool off between, or maybe the 'rents only run the AC a few hours every evening.
ii) Power. Wall power can be extra glitchy on hot days in the summer, due to higher usage load by aircons, fridges etc and by transformers and substations overheating etc. Aquiring even a modest sized UPS may help your rigs ride out the numerous breif glitches and brownouts. Failing that, if you've got any oversized PSUs hanging around or see some very cheap, consider using them on your folding rigs that are struggling along on the 250 or 300W ATXes that you had spare at the time. They will ride out minor glitches better with a larger PSU in. Also you will help to avoid overheating issues with maxed out PSUs. So if you've got a 550W hanging round waiting for something, let it wait in one of your folding rigs over the summer.
iii) Big packets hammer your RAM, if you've volted it and FSBed it to the limit, this inexpensive and ingeneous cooling device by Felinuz may be your answer to summer stability....
http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=350891
iv) The magic of blowers, add a new lease of life to any old heatsink, get c/w figures as good as some waterblocks, get VERY IMPRESSIVE air cooling results for very little outlay....
http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=370365
v) Ducting, you might only have so much airflow, but getting it to the right places is crucial. Experiment with cardboard and tape, implement more permanently if you prefer. Fresh air to the CPU fan intake is always a way to improve high temperature stability without having to replace a case with mediocre airflow characteristics with something spendy, or fit it with the equivalent of a Boeing 747's amount of static thrust in fans. One extra fan in the right place might do more than two more random intakes and exhausts.
vi) add threads here. Post all threads with inexpensive, highly efficient (bang per buck) cooling mods.
Q: ummm, "and win"?
A: You "win" we "win" the whole Team "wins" with better cooling this summer.
"Dig them in", and keep them folding,
Road Warrior
This is our summer, alright!!!
