What's a good CPU cooler these days?

That’s fine, assuming you’re running p95 with threads equal to your number of physical cores, or double if your CPU has hyperthreading.

55 C at 100% CPU load with Prime 95 is great. Usually it’s fine if you hit 70 or even 80 at Prime95 maxed, since other processes which max the CPU are almost always less than Prime95.

Heh, usually the problem is not too little but too much thermal paste.

You really do want a thin layer, with any kind of decent heatsink (and of course it’s best if you wipe both surfaces off with an acetone-based cleaner first).

Yeah, I know, which is why I’m paranoid about having gotten enough on there. The thought process was something like “Okay… this is about the size of a lentil… that should be about enough… I’ll just depend on the seating process to distribute it.”

It’s just always a crapshoot depending on your knowledge of what should be happening,assuming you do stuff right, when you can’t look to make sure it got distributed right. Or maybe I’m just OCD about stuff. ;)

At any rate, seems like I’m in decent shape, so will consider things solved. Thanks for the HSF recommendations… I feel silly with this huge cooler popping out of my motherboard (in a case that’s already silly because of the stupid window and lights on the front fan and lights on the video card…) but as long as it’s working, I can continue to underutilize it to play simple games from yesteryear!

Honestly, with the drop-down style of modern heatsinks, I’d always make sure it was distributed across the heat spreader on the CPU.

And heh, I hate that sort of case and tend to go with cheap ones that review decently for airflow. Plain black, doesn’t bother me. (There’s not much clearance for the block heatsink, but it does fit and the airflow’s fine ^^)

Yeah, but it’s roomy as hell and generally quiet until I do something silly like ask my single video card to handle 4k gaming, which was my main goal. My wife has an old Dell i7-920 with one of those vornado type HSF dealies and it sounds like a jet engine when it spins up to cool he processor off.

I have a quite dated Intel I7-920 which came pre-build and one of the four plastic connector screws that was holding the cpu cooler in place was broken, so there was essentially a gap on one side between the cooler and the cpu.
The problem only showed (for over a year) under heavy load otherwise everything ran fine. What was happening, every time the cpu reached 100°C the cpu lowered it’s multiplier immediately and the temperature dropped by a few degrees and then clocked back to normal. The result was an almost consistent 100°C and stuttering in certain, cpu reliant games.
Your CPU has thermal monitoring so my guess is nothing will happen.

ARISE…? I can’t find good thread for “CPU cooling issues” so I’ll pick this one.

Sat down at the PC today and the fans sounded weird. They should have been silent, since the PC wasn’t doing anything. Turns out the SYS Fan was running at 80%+. The CPU Fan was 0. What? That can’t be right. The CPU was also hot, at 80C.

I installed OpenHardwareMonitor and it didn’t see my CPU Fan. Opened the PC and sure enough my five month old Noctua NH-U12A wasn’t spinning. I did a cold boot and it started spinning and the various monitoring tools now see it.

Watching the fan it kept bouncing between 0 and 23% (its baseline). It’s not supposed to ever go below 23%. And the Noctua has two fans (although connected through a splitter), they were both doing the same things. The green line should never go to 0.

And now, after a few minutes, it looks like the fan has stopped and I can’t start it with the MSI Dragon Center controls.

BUT, I’ve been playing AC:Valhalla a lot and the CPU temp is fine. So I don’t really understand what’s going on here. When idle the CPU fan stops and over time the case heats up and the SYS fan has to pick up the slack. But when gaming everything is fine?

Change the fan curve so it’s always on at 25% and see if that works. If not, the fan is bad. They’re moving parts, nothing lasts forever.

Oh look the f’n fan was in DC mode and not PWM mode in the BIOS. Sigh.

I suppose the real question is, why didn’t I notice this before? Oh well, changing the fan mode should fix it.

Thanks Stusser. 😀

That’s interesting, never heard of that problem before. Adding to my mental spankbank.

Hyper 212 Evo is pretty cheap and does a great job. Got a C2Q Q9650 OC from 3Ghz to 4.1Ghz and an i7 920 from 2.66Ghz to 3.8Ghz using 212 Evos. Not sure if you can even oc on that P87, but either way 212 Evo is a great cooler that is compatible with dang near anything.

This will be news to no one, but Noctua, in my case the DH-15, is still awesome.

My NZXT Kraken X63 AiO was amazing. Cool and quiet. For a few months. Then it developed a pump rattle to wake the dead. No vigorous radiator shaking, re-orientation, or black magic could cause it to stop for more than a few minutes. I learned to try to tune it out.

I just replaced it w/ the Noctua and immediately my life at the computer is vastly improved. CPU is running cooler, and it’s like a library in here. I should have done this a long time ago.

I’m still going to follow through w/ NZXT to try to get it replaced, but even if they do, it’s destined for a spare PC or eventually a PC for one of my kids. The Noctua is here to stay.

Screw water cooling. It isn’t worthwhile. YouTubers like it because they tear down and rebuild all the time. Doesn’t make sense for normal users.

Welcome to the Noctua cult. I cringe when I see water-cooling setups that still have to be cooled by inferior, louder fans.