On Tuesday 12 July 2005 01:03, Ryan Doherty wrote: > I'm just curious... at what CPU temperature & system temperature should I > become worried? I recently purchased my high-end Pentium 4 system.. over > the past couple days (during hot weather), I have noticed that the CPU > temperature went as high as 60C and the system temperature went beyond 40C.
Sounds fine to me. CPU temp limits depend on the CPU type but anything up to 70C is fine for a P4. I don't know what "hot weather" means in terms of ambient temp around your system but if the case temp is within 20C of ambient I wouldn't bother increasing the ventilation as the user (you) will suffer the effects of overheating before the system does. > Should I consider additional fans, if so does anyone have brand/type > suggestions? I've heard that brand&placement of fans are more important > than quantity. Placement - yes - there is no point in placing an extra case fan so that it is simply recirculating hot air. You need to balance airflow into the case with airflow out of it, not forgetting the airflow contribution (usually out) through the PSU. If anything try to have more inflow than outflow as the resulting small positive pressure in the case will help keep environmental dust out of removeable media devices. Some cases have a vent in the side panel with a duct leading to the heart of the CPU cooler fan. This complicates airflow calculations but does help the CPU cooler since much of its input air is "cool" air drawn from the outside rather than pre-heated air drawn from within the case. Unfortunately this piece of intelligent design does not work with some CPU coolers where the fan is mounted on a bracket rather than bolted straight onto the heatsink, nor if (like me) you like to reverse the fan so that it draws hot air from the heat sink rather than blowing dust into its fins. Caution, if you try this, the cooling performance is reduced slightly if you reverse the fan (at any rate until the heat sink fins get clogged up) so be conservative with the cooler specification. Brand - seems irrelevant - raw specifications in terms of cu ft/min mean far more. However lots of cu ft/min in a small diameter tends to mean a lot of noise. For this reason I prefer to use oversize fans with voltage regulators to reduce the fan rpm slightly as a small reduction in rpm usually results in a very large reduction in fan noise whilst hardly affecting the air flow. Quality _is_ important. Cheapo fans tend to be noisier and are certainly less reliable than at least some of the more expensive types, though they (the cheap ones) may at least give you warning of impending failure by horrendous noises from the bearings in the last few hours or days before they seize up solid. CPU heat sink/fan assemblies - I tend to reject "retail pack" coolers in favour of Zalman products, though this is largely as a consequence of wanting to reduce noise - "retail pack" coolers (fitted correctly!) seem to be fine so far as controlling the CPU temp is concerned. I'm sure that there are plenty of other perfectly competent third-party heat sink/fan assemblies on the market; just make sure that whatever you buy suits the CPU (look for the max rating as well as making sure that the correct fitments are supplied) and the mobo (some heatsinks require an absence of tall components close to the CPU socket as they overhang the socket to a considerable extent). Regards Brian Beesley _______________________________________________ Prime mailing list [email protected] http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime
