e6400 at 55c idle? and a few others - thanks!

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regeisle

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Sorry to bombard with questions lately... finished the e6400 build yesterday and have a few more before i get it up and running as main system.

1 - idle, i'm at 55c, which seems incredibly high. from what I could tell, the stock hs/fan was installed correctly and all pins went through (worst design ever), but at these temps I'm guessing something went wrong. first i took took the thermal pad off and applied ceramique as directed to cpu and hs base. i did have to pull the hs off once to reset it and make sure it was locked in. Do you need to clean and reapply the paste each time you remove hs? When I looked at it, it hadn't quite smoothed out - on the cpu, the paste looked like it spread out but had all sorts of little spikes (like spikey cake frosting i guess) and wasn't smooth. any suggestions? i'm looking at an aftermarket cooler now, but I heard the stock was fine as long as no overclocking.

2 - first time with sata drives. no raid, just 2 drives straight up. installed the first one to get up and running and xp installed. then went back and installed the 2nd and it's detected in device mgr but not displaying under my comp. the asus P5B-E manual said to put the 'data' drive, which to me is drive #2, in the 5th sata slot (black). Is that causing the problem?

3 - if anyone has the sonata 2 with hd rails w/ the rubber grommets - case only came with 4 of those long screws, so right now i have 2 in each drive, but want 4 per. Are those readily available at a local comp shop, or are they special ordered from antec?

Thanks for the help guys!

Rich
 
1. yes you should reapply thermal compound EVERY time the HSF is removed. the old compound should be thoroughly removed first of course. the "spikiness" you're talking of is just from the paste breaking contact between the two surfaces. the key point is to follow the instructions on arctic silver's website to the letter. far too many people think they know better than the instructions so put too much on, the instructions are there for a reason. you need to have just enough compound to do the job and NO more because it is actually a relatively poor conductor of heat when compared to the metals of the IHS and HSF. the compound is only there to get rid of air in between the cpu heat spreader and the heatsink fan, air is of course an even worse conductor of heat.

2. i don't think you've formatted the hdd. go into control panel>administrative tools>computer management>disk management. in disk management on the right hand side you should see the hdd that isn't showing up and it should say "unallocated space" on the diagram corresponding to it. right click on the diagram and click "new partition". you should be able to figure it out from there as it starts a wizard.

3. no clue
 
I would ditch the stock heatsink personally. Buy one that does NOT use the 4 push-pin mounting method - I really cant think of a worse way to attach a heatsink short of using duct tape and/or magic.

When applying AS5 the website will tell you to bead it down the center of the cpu and push the heatsink down while rotating it cw and ccw. The AS5 will dissipate and create a thin air tight layer between the heatsink and the processor.

What I prefer is to bead out a layer, spread it thinly with a credit card across the whole surface of the processor. Then when installing the heat sink I rotate it cw and ccw to force out air bubbles and create a nice airtight surface.

As was stated earlier, more AS5 is not better. The idea is to lower the contact resistance between the two metal surfaces as much as possible.
 
on that note, think it's ok to run the comp for a few days with moderate load temps in the low 60c's? I'll order a new cooler today but it won't get her til wednesday most likely and no one in town sells anything decent. I was hoping to be up and running 100% on the new system come Monday, but if it's harmful to the proc, I can wait.

Also, I ran out of AS5 and have a tube of Vantec thermal paste that came with a socket 478 h/s i got earlier this year for my p4. I can't find instructions for it anywhere - are the generally all the same approach? I know some say apply to proc only, and some to both proc and bottom of h/s.

thanks again
 
If you haven't ordered a cooler yet. Get Zalman cnps9500. My fx-55 runs @ 36 c to 41 c depending on if I'm running mutiple resource demanding programs.
 
That is an awesome cooler for the price. Another good one would have been the Thermaltake Big Typhoon.
 
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