38c at idle
 

Is 38C at idle a good temp running the following cooling setup:

DD TDX on an AMD64 3500 (not overclocked)
DD maze4 on a x800xtpe
DD D4
BIX
1/2-inch tubing
Three hard drives
2x optical drives

I have't run any load tests on it because I just got the box built and all it's got onit is Windows right now.

BTW, the temperature is coming out of the bios readings.

Withouit any other critical information it seems a little high. Room temp? Water temp? Fan size and speed? Load temp?

Room temp around 22.3C.

Case temp is about 34C

Water temp unknown. (How do I measure that?)

Fan is 2x panaflo at 7 volts in a push pull arrangement pulling air through a dedicated duct with no case air being drawn through the radiator. Fans are both a little more than an inch off the surface of the radiator.

Waterflow is Pump -> GPU -> CPU -> Radiator -> Pump

Could I have used a little too much thermal compound on the cpu?

Seems to me with a case temp that high your cpu temp could infact be that high. Do you have and fan removing air from the case? Plus your gpu is already adding heat aswell.


My 2cents
-Brandon

I have a fan (120mm Panaflo @ 7 volts) sucking air into the case and a vent in the back for the air to exit. The heat in the case is probably coming from the drives.

When I first got it, I thought this little YY cube was going to be a good case, but it really is still too cramped for what I have in it (I don't get the impression that there's good side-to-side ventilation). I'll be posting pics tonight I hope.

I'm currently lusting after the MountainMods UFO case (http://www.mountainmods.com) - 18 inches of cubic goodness.

Drives dont put out that much heat;

I find its a better practice to pull air through the case, rather than try and push it...

Well, I bumped up the FSB to 220 and changed the memory timing to 1T, and played a few games (Half-life2, Day of Defeat, Grand Prix Legends and Nascar racing 2003) for a couple of hours. No lockups or crashes, and the temp only went up to 43C. It seems as if the watercooling is working.

:)

Both the idle and load temp sound about right for the A64. You could squeeze a few more out of it but at the price of a lot of effort. My experience with the Winchester is its very tolerant of temperature and where you're running, it should be happy.

Hoot

Those temps sound good if they're coming from the BIOS.

I was disappointed with my temps until I stuck a thin probe next to the CPU core and found it was 10 - 15'C cooler than the BIOS was reporting! (That was with an Abit NF7 S and a Mobile Barton).

What motherboard are you using? Some of them are known for having poor BIOS temperature readings. The MSI Neo2 Platinum is a good example. I'm not sure any of them are really accurate for that matter.

That's the one I have (K8N version)

Reading a core by nudging a ribbon type thermistor up against it works okay if you trim back the plastic from the end exposing the actual thermistor. Then affix it to the edge of the core with a small dib of AS epoxy. That's how we did it 3-4 years ago. Even then, it'll read a degree or two lower than in the center of the core. There's an excellent article in the archives over at Overclockers.com on how to do it.

The K8N reads the on-die diode in a particularly poor manner. Amazingly, the temps read at the high end are close enough to assess the effectiveness of changing cooling components, but the temperature read at the low end is totally off. Witness the fact that you can removed the thermal diaode and the K8N Neo2 Platinum still says you are getting 40C. Talk about "cooking the books!" That's why I built an external diode reader based upon the MAXIM6658 IC. Works great once you get the diode calibrated per the instructions at the Arctic Silver web page. There is an excellent article on making an external reader also over at Overclockers.com in the archives.

Hoot

If even a single one was accurate it would be big news here.

I put some temperature diodes on the side of the waterblocks (there was no other place else to put them) and hooked them up to a digitaldoc5 (crappy rotating readout, and damn hard to see from my most convenient viewing angle).

CPU is at 33C
GPU is at 35C
Case is at 30C

Since the bios reported a four-degree increase under load, I suspect these temps will peform similarly.