FYI, I am back up and running!
I’ve booted up a few games – including Snowrunner – and the temperatures are acceptable, but I haven’t done any stress testing. I’ll probably take the computer through some Snowrunner later today to see how it fares, but it looks like it was just a matter of my initial coat of thermal paste failing to last a mere nine years:
Thanks, Obama!
-Tom
Noice. Welp, I did my best to try to get you to spend money.
Mazel tov!
I like the noctua aesthetic because it speaks to my personal preference of not caring what the inside of my computer looks like because it’s under my desk. I care about it being quiet and performing well, in that order.
Huzzah!
Seconded Huzzah!
How much paste did you end up using? Did you 3 grains of rice, pea, smear, or cthulhu it?
Also where are the pics? :P
The heatsink/fan combo I ordered came with paste:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06Y4146PJ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00
Except that when I opened it, there was no paste! TOM SMASH!!!1! I stormed over to my laptop to inform Amazon of my EXTREME FURY, and noticed that it says it includes “Pre-Applied Tronstore Thermal Paste”. So the paste was just a small patch of color on the bottom of the heatsink that I’m assuming has melted and spread evenly by now.
Although before I hang the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner on my monitor, I am a bit concerned that it might still be running hot. After about an hour of Snowrunner, my cores are running at about 75-80C with spikes at 85C. Hmm, this seems hot.
-Tom
That is one mighty small heat sink and fan combo.
D:
Might it actually be worse than the OEM Intel cooler?
Where is the copper? THE COPPER!
If the crashes have gone I wouldn’t worry about it. If that size fan provided mega cooling there’d be no market for all the other ones pictured in this thread :)
The reviews do suggest that, yeah. Oh well, 85C is better anyway.
To be honest, I bought that one because the better heat sink/fan combos weren’t eligible for next day delivery. My priority was on speed, not quality!
Also, I figure spiking temperatures of 85C are enough to keep the possibility of a new mobo/CPU/RAM/case in play.
-Tom
You guys dissin’ Noctua over aesthetics, apparently are not aware they come in pure black now!
Amazon.com: Noctua NH-U12S chromax.Black, 120mm Single-Tower CPU Cooler (Black) : Electronics
Amazon.com: Noctua NH-D15 chromax.Black, Dual-Tower CPU Cooler (140mm, Black) : Electronics
For simplicity’s sake, you could just measure the height of your current cooler, and just assume that anything taller probably won’t fit.
A quick Googling shows a lot of hits out there for Alienware water cooling upgrades. Might check out info from some folks who have already done it.
One thing: I noticed that your motherboard has no heatsinks for the VRMs. You’ll need some if you go with water cooling. Should only cost a few bucks.
Although to be honest, it has probably been doing that for a year or more anyway and you didn’t notice.
It’s such a strange norm that a 10 year old CPU is still fine for most gaming with a recent GPU.
It seems that the second half of my subject header is indeed relevant: I believe my computer is approaching heat death.
Now that everything is back up and running, I’ve fired up Snowrunner and Elden Ring and Dying Light 2 and all seems to be running well enough. Which is to say, as well as they were running before: hot, but acceptable, I suppose. I even checked out Ghostwire Tokyo, which ran well enough, despite some hitching, I guess when the spell effects get crazy? Let’s see what the temperatures look lik-- GAH. Not only is it running hot, but all the CPU loads hit 100%. I mean, I knew my CPU was a bottleneck, but that seems to be quite the bottleneck.
(EDIT: And now I see even Pinball FX3 spikes all the cores to 100% load. Maybe that’s to be expected? Or maybe it’s just that the Indiana Jones table is particularly demanding on CPU cores, what with all the digitized sound bites from the movie, the bright colors, the hardcore ball physics, and the John Williams music.)
I wonder now if all my complaints about ray tracing as nothing more than a way to slow down your framerate might have been misplaced? Maybe I’ve been mistaking the effects of a CPU bottleneck for graphics overload? But it also occurs to me: Could this be the thing that’s been causing occasional 1-2 second hitches in some games? It’s been bedeviling me for years, common enough to notice, but rare enough that I can’t be bothered to track it down. Maybe once every ten hours, and only in certain games. But maybe this has been what heat throttling looks like?
At any rate, I see now how a computer from 2014 is a limitation, even if I have a videocard from 2020. And I think it’s probably time to bring the rest of my computer to the level of my videocard. So, temperature has been troubleshot, the imminent heat death of my computer is at hand, and now I need to hit the “help choosing a pre-built system” thread. See you guys over there!
-Tom
Yay , Tom is getting a new PC!
Hey eight years is a great run for a PC.
This seems like a good thread to discuss heat and PC tower placement.
Back story: For three years now I’ve been on a knife’s edge to get a new gaming PC or a current gen console. Instead, I elected to get a Quest 2 for light VR and see where that would go. Well, I’m convinced, I want to play MSFS2020 in VR and not on a flatscreen, therefore new PC it is.
Next problem. I want to game in the living room, so I can ethernet cable from teh modem to the PC and wifi link to my Quest Headset, and also, I don’t want to game alone in my office away from the family. This means using my 4k TV as a monitor some of the time, but mostly Virtual Desktopping onto the Quest so even pancake gaming can be biiiig. So, is this a decent idea, knowing I’ll have to get a little floldable tray to sit a wifi keyboard and mouse for some things. And then… where do I put the tower that my wife won’t hate looking at it. This means, where can I hide it where heat won’t be an issue, given it’ll probably be a beast of a machine to handle MSFS in VR, so an i7-i9 with GTX3080 (let’s pretend I find the money).
So I have two possibilities: My Ikea HAVSTA bookshelves [that I’ve custom carpenter’d into having a 42"TV enclosure] have no backing, meaning there’s about an inch and a bit of open air in the back where the shelves meet the floor skirting, and air can flow between every book enclosure. The TV fits fairly snug in it’s enclosure though, basically only an inch of space all around the tv.
So, I’ve measured and a tower will fit behind the tv, flat to the wall, with only an inch to it’s front and back (as the enclosure has a middle dividing wall), and probably again only an inch between the wall and the back of the tv. Will heat / airlfow be an issue? The tv probably has a bit of heat going on too I guess, though it doesn’t seem that noticeable.
The other option is to put it in the wooden cabinet below the tv, but this does have a cardboard backing, meaning no flow of air from behind, and I’m guessing I’d have to open the cabinet doors every time I have the PC on, right? And even then, with ‘walls’ on three sides, will this be an issue for heat?
I have no idea how much air is enough, and what factors will play on managing the temperature. Note I live in the southern UK where maybe we get three weeks of 90 deg temperatures in summer at the absolute most (excluding incoming climate change disaster). Thoughts?
Does your office or any other room have an ethernet connection to the living room? You could keep the tower there and use any laptop for Steam Link or better Moonlight as a client.
Better, disguise a 20 meter HDMI cable in the wall molding and get perfect quality…
No question you’d need the doors open if it’s otherwise fully enclosed, but that should do it. You could always make some holes in the back :) MSFS will push the system as much as anything will. I did fully enclose my tower at one point, also in southern England, and it did indeed start crashing after a while :)