Opty 165 overheating? Help!

L31mr0d

Ok so i've had my Opty for nearly a month now, and initially I just assumed it might be settling in and the temperatures would eventually start to drop, but no luck, they are still at, what I would deem, unacceptable levels.

I'm using the CNPS9500-Cu by Zalman which is supposed to be one of the best air coolers out there, I have no shortage of fans, which is shown in the picture below, there is also a 120mm intake fan at the front pushing 75cfm.

At stock settings: 1.8Ghz (200x9) it idles at around 38'c and loads up to 52'c. At my current settings of 2.7Ghz (300x9) it idles at around 45'c and loads at 61'c. Now in my opinion, using the cooler that I have, which has a perfectly lapped copper base, with silver TIM I should be getting lower than that. The room my comps in is like a fridge also.

During full load as well when the CPU is hitting 62'c i've opened the side of the case and touched the cooler, its not even warm, neither are the heatpipes.

So any ideas on whats going on or how to fix it?

PogMoThoin

I have the same zalman cooler & when i read up about them I found that they are marketed more as a quiet cooler, than as a super cooling cooler. There are loads of other coolers that perform much better than them. I'm considering changing mine for an Arctic freezer pro.
Never had an opty so i can't really comment on what temps you should be getting with your oc.

L31mr0d

Yeah but surely the heatsink should be getting hot? I mean the Zalman VF900 I have on my graphics card gets hot after a while, but the one on my CPU never gets even remotely hot, in fact it sometimes feels colder than the ambient temperature inside the case. This also was happening when I used it with an AMD3700+ at 2.7Ghz, I was getting temps almost identical to the stock hsf, and the actual heatsink or pipes never even got hot.

Cuddlesworth

Its all in the mount. How much thermal paste, is it tight? I spent a entire weekend on just practising best temps with different mounts.

Rule of thumb is, you are doing it right when you remove the Hsf and you can see clearly through the thermal paste on both sides to the metal below. Remember its only there to fill the tiny holes where the metal doesnt touch.

Also make sure you have cleaned off both the Hsf and cpu perfectly before each mount.

TonyM.

I have an Opteron 170 with Arctic Cooler Freezer pro it runs at 32c idle @ 2.80 it will run cooler if i turn up the case fans .The CPU was running at 34c but i replaced the chipset fan on my Asus mobo and re-gigged the other fans and the temp. dropped 2c i have Q-FAN running to keek noise down the cpu fan is running at 1150 rpm it goes up to 2500 rpm when i am gaming but the temp never tops 40c.

Ps Suggest you check your temp in the BIOS maybe the readings are wrong .

Love to have your ram , great pictures really cool setup.

conzy

Sounds like a dodgey temp probe.....

L31mr0d

That what I thought too but I was getting high temps with this cooler using my old mobo (an ASUS AN8-Sli). It would be pretty bad luck if I had 2 dodgy temp probes on 2 different makes of mobo. The fact the cooler isn't even getting hot after leaving the cpu priming for over a few hours must mean that there is some problem getting the heat away from the cpu. The only thing I can think of is that the 9500 isn't tight enough against the core, even when I tighten it down I can still rotate it a little. The mechanism the heatsink uses to attach itself to the mobo is, imo, flimsy. But i'm at a loss as to what I should do to fix it?

I guess I should of went with conzys recommendation and got an AF pro in the first place. The plethora of Cu on the Zalman is what pulled me away. I guess i'll rejig the heatsink this weekend and see what happens. I might also just stop the fan for a few minutes and see if the heatsink gets hot at all.

SirLemonhead

I have the freezer 64 pro (or whatever its called) and I'd recommend that too. It's fairly cheap from what I remember. I idle about 32 degrees on an Opteron 146 overclocked 700 mhz. My room is usually quite warm too.