86C too hot for SandyBridge?

[BonzaiDuck]

I know from my experience with the 212 when I used to have it on my phenom system that the bottom of the thing sucks. It is far from flat and a REAL pain to get paste applied to properly. For this reason I refuse to fool with it even though it is cheap. Anyway, do you have to be at 4.6? Why not just drop down to 4.5 and knock a bit of voltage off?

" . . . the bottom of the thing sucks . . . ."

Before spending more money (even though you could do better than the 212), I'd pull the cooler from the system and apply a metal straight-edge to the cooler base with some strong lighting behind it, checking flatness in reference to four or eight directions of the compass.

If as 86waterpumper suggests -- that the cooler base on the 212 is no less irregular than for some other models (including the NH-D14), you have the option of grinding the cooler base flat. If you care to remove the processor (after resetting the clock to default), you could do the same thing.

The worst that happens by lapping the base of the 212 is voiding the warranty on a "so-so" cooler. If you want better, you can make the decision at that point.

In my own case, I have the NH-D14. I also have a core with either a sensor that is out of whack -- or that core just runs hotter. The overall temperature indicator seems to ride with the whacky core.

This seems to be a different situation than that of the OP. For myself, I just follow a rule of thumb to keep my OC settings that give an overall "package" temperature below 73C. This may seem overly cautious, since the other three cores seem to average about 65C ( or vary individually by +/- 2C) under load -- the hot core running at closer to 72.

In Iseeq4life's case, there is no statistical indication of my own problem. I'd take a closer look at that cooler, even grabbing some 400-wet-or-dri sandpaper and lapping it if such would be indicated -- before springing for the near-$80 D14.

Did he say anything about airflow and the cpu-fan?

 

[mmaestro]

OP's using a Sonata IV. IIRC that only has a single 120mm tricool in the back plus whatever air the PSU moves. However, pulling the side off the case didn't make a difference. I don't think that accounts for the temperature's being quite so high, although (having just checked AT's review of the Sonata) it looks like 80 or a little more wouldn't be out of the question. He hasn't given temperatures at stock yet. I'd love to know what temperatures he reaches without overclocking.

 

[grkM3]

using max memory in intel burn test is a beating on the cpu,you should be glad its not crashing and stable using that much ram.

Your cpu will NEVER get anywhere near that much load in real life and you wont see over 73-75c in normal use and hard gaming use.

try 1 gb of ram and I bet you wont break 75c

 

[AdamK47]

using max memory in intel burn test is a beating on the cpu,you should be glad its not crashing and stable using that much ram.

Your cpu will NEVER get anywhere near that much load in real life and you wont see over 73-75c in normal use and hard gaming use.

try 1 gb of ram and I bet you wont break 75c

It's good for worst case scenario, which is what a good stress test is suppose to do. I won't trust a system if it can't run LinX at max memory usage for 8 hours followed by Prime95 small-FFT to another 8 hours.

During the test I also turn off central air to my computer room.

 

[blackened23]

75c is a pretty low standard for an aftermarket cooler, get real man. Most people with aftermarket coolers don't go past 65C Max, and even thats pushing it......I have a corsair H50 which cost like 50 bucks and I don't go past 62C at 4.6. 75 is lunacy.

I'd expect 75 from the crap stock intel cooler, NOT for something I spend 40$+ on. D, depending on what kind of stuff you do on your computer running extended high temps / voltages will lower the lifespan of their CPU. What people don't realize is that death from overclocking doesn't happen overnight , it can happen 6 months to a year down the road. I was a similar predicament a couple of times and I came back a year later to a dead CPU....which ran hot 24/7. I have a dead i7-870 that died after 1.5 years, oddly enough it ran close to 70+ ... alot. Now some 16 year old on their first computer will tell you everythings fine. Nah - its your money and I don't really care, but I personally like protecting my investment. Get a good cooler if you want to overclock. Don't settle for a shit temp like 75C....if you spend 50$+ you shouldn't be getting over 65C ever. Thats my advice for whats its worth.

If you get the noctua NH-14 you will not be disappointed, if your budget allows it.

 

[grkM3]

75c is a pretty low standard for an aftermarket cooler, get real man. Most people with aftermarket coolers don't go past 65C Max, and even thats pushing it......I have a corsair H50 which cost like 50 bucks and I don't go past 62C at 4.6. 75 is lunacy.

I'd expect 75 from the crap stock intel cooler, NOT for something I spend 40$+ on. D, depending on what kind of stuff you do on your computer running extended high temps / voltages will lower the lifespan of their CPU. What people don't realize is that death from overclocking doesn't happen overnight , it can happen 6 months to a year down the road. I was a similar predicament a couple of times and I came back a year later to a dead CPU....which ran hot 24/7. I have a dead i7-870 that died after 1.5 years, oddly enough it ran close to 70+ ... alot. Now some 16 year old on their first computer will tell you everythings fine. Nah - its your money and I don't really care, but I personally like protecting my investment. Get a good cooler if you want to overclock. Don't settle for a shit temp like 75C....if you spend 50$+ you shouldn't be getting over 65C ever. Thats my advice for whats its worth.

If you get the noctua NH-14 you will not be disappointed, if your budget allows it.

run intel burn test with 8gb ram selected and report back what your temps are.

and again for the record so people read this...A stock clocked 2500k and stock volts/heatsink will hit over 65c running intel burn test.

By this you are saying that a stock running 2500 will fail in a year and that is wrong

 

[AdamK47]

75c is a pretty low standard for an aftermarket cooler, get real man. Most people with aftermarket coolers don't go past 65C Max, and even thats pushing it......I have a corsair H50 which cost like 50 bucks and I don't go past 62C at 4.6. 75 is lunacy.

I'd expect 75 from the crap stock intel cooler, NOT for something I spend 40$+ on. D, depending on what kind of stuff you do on your computer running extended high temps / voltages will lower the lifespan of their CPU. What people don't realize is that death from overclocking doesn't happen overnight , it can happen 6 months to a year down the road. I was a similar predicament a couple of times and I came back a year later to a dead CPU....which ran hot 24/7. I have a dead i7-870 that died after 1.5 years, oddly enough it ran close to 70+ ... alot. Now some 16 year old on their first computer will tell you everythings fine. Nah - its your money and I don't really care, but I personally like protecting my investment. Get a good cooler if you want to overclock. Don't settle for a shit temp like 75C....if you spend 50$+ you shouldn't be getting over 65C ever. Thats my advice for whats its worth.

If you get the noctua NH-14 you will not be disappointed, if your budget allows it.

Yeah, you souldn't be getting over 65C ever... EVER!

 

[86waterpumper]

f as 86waterpumper suggests -- that the cooler base on the 212 is no less irregular than for some other models (including the NH-D14), you have the option of grinding the cooler base flat. If you care to remove the processor (after resetting the clock to default), you could do the same thing.

Here is a pic of the bottom of the 212 for those that have not seen it

Obviously you can see right from the pic the gaps between the sink and the pipes. You CANNOT lap the bottom of the 212 or you will blow right through the heatpipes, they are very thin and you will have a paperweight in no time. The hyper 212 does a decent job of cooling compared to a stock sink because it is just so freaking huge, and has a big fan, which isn't very quiet even. People like it because it is cheap, and gets the job done, but it does so on brute strength alone. I don't like it, I like to see a quiet cooler with a nice base it doesn't have to be polished to a mirrored finish but somewhat flat is nice. I am much happier with my freezer 13 pro than I was the 212. With all that being said, the temps do seem really high. My guess is that too little paste was used. This is where the 212 sucks. We all have had it beaten into our heads to use a tiny amount of paste or it will do more harm than good, but with the 212 my best luck was filling in the crevices first like spackling a hole in the wall or something...and then put a thin a layer as I could over the whole surface with a credit card. It still wasn't perfect but it did drop the temps some.

 

[ensign_lee]

OP, where do you live?

In Texas, we've had 100+F days for about a month now. My room is right over the garage and my ambients are higher than "normal". Are you in Texas? If so, when it cools down, your ambients should drop to more "acceptable" levels.

 

[beginner99]

I always wonder how people get such low temps. AC on full load and sitting at pc with a winter jacket in a 10°C room?

I have the NH-14 and an i7-875k. As always i planned to overclock but never really got to it.
@3.2 GHZ under load I get 60° C (BOINC Seti@home HT on + milkyway@home on gpu)
and around 38° C when idle

I reset the cooler muliple times and also changes fan layout of case (Fractal define R2 with additional fans). temps stayed pretty much the same.

Its very hot now (and no ac). Ambient is probably around 25-30°, so delta Temp on load is about 35° C. Actually not to bad. Thinking of adding another fan...

 

[Idontcare]

Here is a pic of the bottom of the 212 for those that have not seen it

Obviously you can see right from the pic the gaps between the sink and the pipes. You CANNOT lap the bottom of the 212 or you will blow right through the heatpipes, they are very thin and you will have a paperweight in no time. The hyper 212 does a decent job of cooling compared to a stock sink because it is just so freaking huge, and has a big fan, which isn't very quiet even. People like it because it is cheap, and gets the job done, but it does so on brute strength alone. I don't like it, I like to see a quiet cooler with a nice base it doesn't have to be polished to a mirrored finish but somewhat flat is nice. I am much happier with my freezer 13 pro than I was the 212. With all that being said, the temps do seem really high. My guess is that too little paste was used. This is where the 212 sucks. We all have had it beaten into our heads to use a tiny amount of paste or it will do more harm than good, but with the 212 my best luck was filling in the crevices first like spackling a hole in the wall or something...and then put a thin a layer as I could over the whole surface with a credit card. It still wasn't perfect but it did drop the temps some.

I wonder if this is the reason why direct-contact heatpipes fell by the wayside over the past years. I remember when I bought my Tuniq120 it was right before direct-contact became all the rage. I was quite envious for years of the fact I had a plain-vanilla flat peice of copper for my IHS contact.

Then I went and bought a new rig and was looking for the latest/greates coolers and much to my surprise the direct-contact HSF coolers were nowhere near the top of the performance charts.

Seeing that picture you embedded, its no wonder the performance is lackluster. Even if you fill all those gaps with TIM, thermal paste sucks in terms of thermal conductivity when compared to metal that could/should be in its place.

 

[86waterpumper]

Yeah I agree and noone is perfect at applying the tim either when there is THAT many grooves. Another thing I found is that the supplied paste they give you is not real thick and very spreadable. You need this, because some thicker types such as mx2 is alot harder to deal with on this sink. You need something that is going to ooze down into the grooves good and not just sit in the top. One thing is sure, you are NOT going to get a good contact just using the old one or two line method and let the sink squash it out evenly, it's just not going to happen. My 212 never did anything spectacular on my old 965be. I reseated mine a couple times and tinkered with it, and with the fan running full tilt It hit mid 60s on prime95, with a pretty mild overclock, (3.8ghz) This is at or over the top allowable temp for a amd chip and if I'd wanted 4.0ghz I'd have had to install another fan in push/pull and the thing was already loud. The good thing about the intel cpus is they have a much higher temp range they will run in.

 

[mmaestro]

I always wonder how people get such low temps. AC on full load and sitting at pc with a winter jacket in a 10°C room?

Really. I'm running a 2600K at stock, and blasting it with 8 threads on Prime95 pushes it up to 68 on the hottest core, using a Zalman CNPS9500 AT (yes, it's not the greatest, but I love the look of that big hunk of copper) and about 65 on the others. If I OC, I'll be hitting 70 no problem, I expect.

 

[Idontcare]

I always wonder how people get such low temps. AC on full load and sitting at pc with a winter jacket in a 10°C room?

I think it has a lot to do with the variety of temperature reading programs out there and the lack of accuracy in their implementations.

There is a solid 10C difference between the temps reported for my 2600K between CoreTemp and the Mobo BIOS readings as reported through Asus AI Suite 2.

I'm inclined to believe the Asus probe results only because they built the hardware and the software, if anyone in that loop ought to be capable of correctly reporting the CPU temps it would be the Asus program.

There is no defacto standard 3rd party temp reading program out there to my knowledge. And the varied temps we see reported on the internet could simply be a reflection of this reality.

 

[Diogenes2]

..........
Seeing that picture you embedded, its no wonder the performance is lackluster. Even if you fill all those gaps with TIM, thermal paste sucks in terms of thermal conductivity when compared to metal that could/should be in its place.

The performance for the OP is far worse than lackluster..

There is something wrong the the OP's installation or settings .. It could be a defective HS..

I was using a 212+ before my H70 and my temps might hit the low 80's at 5g and 1.45v when running some stress test ...
While folding@home, temps hover in the mid 70's for my hottest cores..

 

[blackened23]

run intel burn test with 8gb ram selected and report back what your temps are.

and again for the record so people read this...A stock clocked 2500k and stock volts/heatsink will hit over 65c running intel burn test.

I guess i'll go ahead and eat crow here, I downloaded version 2.52 (i think) of intel burn test and using the maximum stress setting and 3 passes -- my temps across all cores varied between 62-66. 1 core hit 67 at 1 point. I'm overclocked to 4.6 and change (101 bus). Didn't think it would be awfully different than prime95 which rarely puts me over 60. My ambient temps aren't Texas hot but i'm in NC, usually with A/C off while working....coolermaster HAF 932 case with H50 in a push/pull configuration, with 3 chassis fans. (love this case btw)

 

[blackened23]

The performance for the OP is far worse than lackluster..

There is something wrong the the OP's installation or settings .. It could be a defective HS..

I was using a 212+ before my H70 and my temps might hit the low 80's at 5g and 1.45v when running some stress test ...
While folding@home, temps hover in the mid 70's for my hottest cores..

What kind of temps do you get on the H70? Just curious. The more I read about the 212, the more it seems like an extremely cheap product with marginal effectiveness. If its that much hassle to just seat properly, i'd say F it and spend the cash on something better.

 

[grkM3]

I guess i'll go ahead and eat crow here, I downloaded version 2.52 (i think) of intel burn test and using the maximum stress setting and 3 passes -- my temps across all cores varied between 62-66. 1 core hit 67 at 1 point. I'm overclocked to 4.6 and change (101 bus). Didn't think it would be awfully different than prime95 which rarely puts me over 60. My ambient temps aren't Texas hot but i'm in NC, usually with A/C off while working....coolermaster HAF 932 case with H50 in a push/pull configuration, with 3 chassis fans. (love this case btw)

So you hit 67 in a few passes while being water cooled?so lets say around 72-74c after 20 passes.

Now install the crappy stock cooler and see how fast it hits 75c

Now download linx64 and stress the cpu,linx gets about 5-8c higher temps than intel burn test on my comp.

See when I was telling you my chip hits mid 80s it was with linx64 running along with super pi 32m to stress the memory controller at the same time.

My chip will nwver hit over 63-65c in real use but 10 min of linx and its in the 80s

 

[blackened23]

So you hit 67 in a few passes while being water cooled?so lets say around 72-74c after 20 passes.

Now install the crappy stock cooler and see how fast it hits 75c

Now download linx64 and stress the cpu,linx gets about 5-8c higher temps than intel burn test on my comp.

See when I was telling you my chip hits mid 80s it was with linx64 running along with super pi 32m to stress the memory controller at the same time.

My chip will nwver hit over 63-65c in real use but 10 min of linx and its in the 80s

Well, the H50 isn't a "real" water cooler, and for 10 passes it didn't go past 67. It only blipped 67 briefly in an early run on 1 core. My temp tends to stay pretty even, of course I think a lot of it has to do with the airflow in my case. I'm pretty OCD about making sure everythings in order when it comes to the chassis/cooling.

I was just kind of surprised that there was such a big difference between prime95 and the burn test, really, and I have run linx before although that was mostly on my older 860/870 systems

 

[Diogenes2]

What kind of temps do you get on the H70? Just curious. The more I read about the 212, the more it seems like an extremely cheap product with marginal effectiveness. If its that much hassle to just seat properly, i'd say F it and spend the cash on something better.

The H70 runs about 3- 5c cooler; but that's with one fan, pushing out of the case ..

The only reason I switched was to reduce case clutter, and it is a bit quieter, but I guess that has more to do with my fan ( COOLER MASTER Excalibur) than anything ...


There have been many discussions here, about the 212+ and Overclocked SB's, with overwhelmingly favorable reports..

I would be curious to know where you have been reading about it's marginal effectiveness..

 

[E6700]

hyper 212 is garbage.. replace it with something better.

 

[rbk123]

I used a moderate amount thermal paste that came with the cooler. Just a small drop on the heat sink and a drop on the CPU. Thinned it out with a credit card so it has a even and flat layer across both surfaces. It filled in all the crevices between the heat pipes and heat sink.

Waaay too much paste. Clean off all of the old paste on both the CPU and the 212+. Use 1/2 a grain of rice right in the middle of the CPU and leave it there (don't spread it). Put the heat sink on. That's it.

People think that every nook and cranny has to be filled and that's not how it works.

Give less a shot; you've already tried it the other way so what do you have to lose?

 

[grkM3]

you can try sanding the bottom of that cooler to make it nice and flat.

Here is my custom water cooled setup.You cant see it good but I have all the wires coming from the back of the case and its looks so clean in person.I have 8 sata drives plugged in right now and 2 rads inside the case with 4 case fans on top of the 3 fans I have on the radiators.

 

[blackened23]

Not bad not bad, do you have a waterblock on your vidcard too? My 6970 is hideously loud (and i have to run the fan high to oc it to 950/1450) and I thought about getting a block for it.

 

[grkM3]

I have some but I dont need them.I have a spare 560 in another pc that I had for sli and that was more than enough for me at stock clocks.