Question about Athlon 2800+ Barton & Temperatures

B

Blackdog

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 13, 2004
Messages
140
I recently changed from a noisy Thermaltake Volcano 11+ CPU Cooler to a ThermalTake Silent Boost CPU Cooler for my AMD Athlon XP 2800+ Barton. I've got an Asus A7N8X Deluxe Rev. 1006 Motherboard and 1.5 GB Corsair XMS PC2700 DDR RAM, Windows XP Pro SP 2. I just upgraded my BIOS to v1008. Running 6 80mm fans in my Lian Li PC75b Case (2 exhaust, 2 intake) and a 430 watt Enermax PSU (2 fans). Gainward Geforce FX 5950 256 MB Video Card.

Before I put the new cooler on, i cleaned off the processor with some special alcohol my father had for cleaning off the thermal grease. I then added a thin layer of thermal grease (Arctic Silver 3) to the die and spread it a little bit with a flat blade razor. I did notice that at first, the tube of thermal grease was a bit liquidy, but became a little bit more solid when I shook it up (this might be my issue right there?). At any rate, I got it on the motherboard, and fired up the PC and it was running fine temps, around the same idle temps as before - 41-43 degrees Celsius. Load temps of 45-46 C.

I decided to test out some games, mainly Far Cry, Doom 3 and Star Wars Galaxies. It was with Far Cry I got a weird error that I didn't get in any other game. Something within my PC would constantly beep (long beep) until I either /quit or alt-tabbed out of the game. Now I'm not really sure if it's the CPU, motherboard or Video Card - but what worried me is my CPU is now reading 50-55 degrees Celsius (In Asus Probe). In the Bios it says 63 degrees Celsius after I rebooted.

I know the max recommended temperatures is 85 degrees Celsius for this CPU, but I much prefer to see it down near 39-41 degrees Celsius. Could my heatsink not be seated well upon the CPU die? Would this be why I'm getting temperatures 10 degrees higher than before? Might I have to redo the thermal paste? I've got a good amount of case fans, so I would think that there would be no issues with case cooling. I have noticed in the past dozen hours since I first noticed the issue that the temps have fluctuated up and down from 50 to 45 to 50. Maybe I just need to let it burn in?

Anyways, I'm kinda a stickler for the CPU temps. They used to idle at 41-43 and at max load were only as high as 48-49 C according to Asus Probe. Any thoughts or help anybody could give me? Many thanks! :)
 
Double check your contact with the heatsink and the cpu core. Also, with regards to your fans, be sure that you are getting a good pull of fresh ambient air across the heatsink (e.g. make sure all of your case fans aren't just randomly blowing into or out of the case). The key is to get a good mass balance of the air blowing through your case, across the cpu, with the same volume of air being pulled into the case by fans as the volume of air that is being pushed out of the case by fans, by matching the volumetric flowrates of the input/output fans. Next, that cpu should be able to hit a 400MHz FSB pretty easily, but I'm curious as to why you are using PC2700 when PC3200 is just as cheap and should put less heat into the case?
 
Well when I originally got the parts to build this computer early/middle last year, the motherboard only supported up to 333 MHz FSB, as well as the fact that the 2800+ was created to run stable on a 333 MHz FSB.

Anyways, for some reason the computer is back down to it's previous idle temps. I'm guessing that I had to let it maybe "burn in"?
 
Well, as a rule of thumb, even the Arctic Silver Corporation specifically states to allow about 200 hours for the material to burn in properly. That way, the silver oxide will precisely fill the gaps, and the temperatures will be as they should be.

I'm just curious though, what type of "special alcohol" did you use to clean the heatsink and processor die? Moonshine? :)

Dark Assassin
 
Blackdog said:
Well when I originally got the parts to build this computer early/middle last year, the motherboard only supported up to 333 MHz FSB, as well as the fact that the 2800+ was created to run stable on a 333 MHz FSB.

Anyways, for some reason the computer is back down to it's previous idle temps. I'm guessing that I had to let it maybe "burn in"?
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's strange isn't it? My experiences with bartons in the past have shown that if I'd install the cpu and let it "burn in" for a couple of days before overclocking it I'd get better results than initially installing it and going for the overclock then. I guess in the end it balances out anyway.

Why don't you go for the 400MHz FSB? I know that your board will do it and if the RAM is stable at it's current latency timings, it will only improve your setup! ;)
 
jarman said:
Why don't you go for the 400MHz FSB? I know that your board will do it and if the RAM is stable at it's current latency timings, it will only improve your setup! ;)
Click to expand...
If I could afford to, perhaps. A good many of the items i own that are expensive (LCD, video card, sound card) were from inheritence money.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top