PC cooling help

[13CentKiller]

Cleaning though, regularly makes most of the odds for me. Pulled my Heatsink off after 6 months and found 8MM of dust under it, literally. So now i clean it every month (This is just the design of my CPU cooler) It seems to trap dust between the heatsink and the Mobo and it just causes it to cook. Probably should invest in a new cooler for that soon, but meh. It's not let my CPU temp get above 38C, so i'm not gonna bother.
Finally, i buy decent thermal paste and change it every 6-8 months or so. Again Artic brand, all thier cooling gear hasn't ever been a let down to me

I hope, if you're removing the heatsink every month, you are replacing the thermal paste every month instead of every 6 to 8. It should always be replaced after removal. Unless I read it wrong and you clean the heatsink when attached to the chip and remove it to clean the paste off and re-apply every 6 or so months.

For me, I have a monster attached to my AMD Thunban X6 Hexacore 3.0GHz CPU @ 3.9GHz. It's a Noctua NH-D14 with the Noctua thermal paste. It's also a very highly regarded thermal compound and works great. The great thing about the stock AMD coolers, is they are actually quite good. But once you start overclocking, it's time to upgrade. I managed 3.6GHz on the stock cooler without any brash sanding measures. But I started hitting the 70 degree mark which is where I get twitchy.

With the NH-D14, my rig never exceeds 42 degrees celcious under full load on an average day. This is rendering frames, playing games or small FFTs. Totally stable and it's lasted me 5 odd years. Noctua is pricy but if you want quality, you pay for it.

The larger your case, the more room you have for cooling and the less you have to worry about things getting too hot. I have a 120mm intake in front of my hard working hard disks and two 200mm extractors up top. I've also got a 120mm extractor at the back which the Noctua blows air in to after drawing the cool air from the front. The large 250mm fan on the side sucks cool air in also.

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01-20-2015, 10:07 AM