Following up on the hot Prescott thread, some findings of mine.
First, Intel email support was useless. All they could tell me was
essentially 'if under 68 C then all is ok', despite my specific questions
about temperature ramp up times (I was wondering about why a cold system
was reading almost 50 in 20 seconds - thinking there may be a problem with
the winbond or Asus temp adc).
Asus has been totally non-responsive. Only 1 email received, telling me to
be sure I had the latest BIOS, even though my initial contact with them
plainly indicated that I had 1017 in place. No response to the reply that
pointed this fact out to them.
I was playing with some video and did some rendering and boy did it get
hot. I reached 75 C and this is with the case all opened up. I've been
watching eBay for some dead socket 478 boards so I could at least try to
get into the BIOS and see what temps were being reported (trying to see if
the motherboard temp reporting was correct) but no luck there.
Being tired of running this thing at 70+ I tried something. I made a
cylinder of paper that fits over the Zalman, forcing all the incoming air
to come from about 12 inches above the case. I then did some heavy video
rendering and the temps were 20+ *lower* than the 'unducted' ones. I was
running at 52-55 whereas the night before with just the opened case I had
hit 75.
This is so bizarre. The case temps are reporting moderately low - low 30's
(closed up - am all opened up at the moment and case is reporting 44 - go
figure on that one). I am getting an almost 40 C delta between case and die
temps.
I can't explain it - even blowing a big floor fan, while keeping me in the
low 50's (light load), did not get it down into the temperatures that most
are reporting.
The ducting sure is significant. At least I know now that I can run
(assuming the temps reported are correct) within Intel specs, albeit still
higher than what others are reporting.
All I have to do now is fabricate some ducting to sit on the Zalman and
mating with a hole in the cover, yet that allows the cover to be slid on
and off.
_________________________________________________________________
JG... Jeff Givens
mailto:
[email protected]
"My hovercraft is full of eels."