Corsair H60 on Core i7-3960x not performing as expected

[allenkim96]

I must have done something wrong, or I must be a newbie when it comes to water coolers (having used nothing but Intel's stock air coolers that come with their retail CPUs).

But I have a Corsair H60 installed on my Intel Core i7-3960X, and it's not performing as well as I would expect. At idle, the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility reports a core temperature around 52-58 degrees. At 100% load, the utility reports around 40-60% throttling because the temperature is at the limit of 90 degrees.

I've even seen some throttling when the load is around 15% (playing Starcraft II), though that's probably due to one or two cores heating up.

I've tried two different thermal pastes. The first one was an Antec Formula 6, but I hated that one because it was too thick and didn't spread well. So I returned that and got a Shin-Etsu MicroSi for real cheap. That spreads better and the performance was a little better, like around 40 degrees idle, but recently the performance has worsened.

I'm on the verge of returning the water cooler and getting a Cooler Master air cooler, but I'd hate to do that since the Corsair H60 runs nice and quiet, which is something I desire.

Did I not install the cooler correctly? I doubt it, since every time I remove it, I see that the thermal paste on it looks OK, i.e. spread thin and even. Maybe I have a bad cooler and need to exchange it? Anyone else have any ideas?

 

[SZLiao214]

How does the cooler you have sound?

If you went from 58 to 40 degrees by swapping the thermal paste then it wasn't the thermal paste that was the issue. A difference that big is usually due to mounting problems.

Also depending on your case the fan orientation(intake vs outtake) can affect the temps a few degrees as well.

 

[allenkim96]

At idle, the cooler sounds nice and quiet. Just a low hum. That's one thing I like about it. At 100%, the fan cranks up but still isn't that loud.

The fan and the radiator fins are mounted on the inside of the back wall of the case. It blows air inwards. I figure it would work better if I blew cold air over the radiator rather than draw warm air out from the case.

Right now, it seems to work a little better. I unmounted the heat sink and applied a little more thermal paste to the areas that didn't have any coverage (i.e. the corners) or looked like it was light on coverage. Idle temperature is now around 40 degrees.

Still, shouldn't this water cooler do even better? Should I even have any throttling on my Core i7-3960X at 100% utilization? I don't know if it's worth it if I can't even run the CPU at full blast without throttling.

 

[d4a2n0k]

Which way is the fan blowing? Are you overclocked?

 

[Topweasel]

Seems like a mounting issue. You can't drop 12-18 degrees even if the pump was broke between idle on the two pastes unless you weren't making enough contact the first time, and are getting better contact now. Now the H60/Kuhler H20 50/ and the Intel water unit, I think use the same pump/radiator and only have the one fan. In benches the Intel unit has allowed CPU's to get very hot (upper 70's to low 80's) on 2011. If its a hot room, or the case isn't well ventilated, putting a push fan on it might help, but again that's assuming proper installation.

 

[allenkim96]

OK I figured out what went wrong. I didn't configure both fans properly in the BIOS. Specifically, I connected the radiator fan to the CPU fan connector, and I connected the liquid pump to one of the chassis fan connectors.

But when the CPU heated up, only the radiator fan runs faster (1000->2000 RPM). The liquid pump stayed at around 1000 RPM.

I found a setting in BIOS where the "fan" connected to the chassis fan connector would also run faster if the CPU heated up. Now when that happens, the liquid pump runs at about 1700 RPM while the radiator fan only goes up to around 1200 RPM.

Better yet, at 100% load the temperature never goes above 75 degrees Celcius. No more CPU thermal throttling. This is good; now I have room to overclock.

 

[StinkyPinky]

OK I figured out what went wrong. I didn't configure both fans properly in the BIOS. Specifically, I connected the radiator fan to the CPU fan connector, and I connected the liquid pump to one of the chassis fan connectors.

But when the CPU heated up, only the radiator fan runs faster (1000->2000 RPM). The liquid pump stayed at around 1000 RPM.

I found a setting in BIOS where the "fan" connected to the chassis fan connector would also run faster if the CPU heated up. Now when that happens, the liquid pump runs at about 1700 RPM while the radiator fan only goes up to around 1200 RPM.

Better yet, at 100% load the temperature never goes above 75 degrees Celcius. No more CPU thermal throttling. This is good; now I have room to overclock.

Still seems hot to me for stock. My budget air cooler keeps my overclocked 2500k to about the high 70's even under extreme stress (Prime). In the real world it hovers around 70-75 under load.

 

[Grooveriding]

I would return the H60 and get the H100. For SB-E, if you want to start overclocking, you'll need a better cooler. They get really toasty once you start raising voltages/clocks.

 

[BrightCandle]

The prebuilt watercoolers don't perform much better than high end air unfortunately. The H100 is about the only one that does do notably better and that is because its got 2x120mm fans with double the radiator area.

We have a simple rule for calculating the thermal capability of watercooling loop. At a reasonable fan volume and decent water temperature (<10C delta) you can cool 130 W per 120mm on a thick (6cm) radiator. A thin (2cm) radiator is only 90 W.

A SB-E overclocked can put out >200W, at the extreme something like 250W just like the i7 920 did. It clearly requires at least 2x120mm radiator slots and fans. Alternatively you could use very high fan speeds (>2000 rpm).

Water cooling isn't magic, its still ultimately air cooled. What it allows you to do is move the heat to somewhere else in the case, where hopefully you can put significantly more fans and metal to the task of exchanging the heat with the air. However the water is warmer than ambient and hence you loose some cooling efficiency compared to having the fan directly on the block on the CPU, which you need to compensate for.

Saying that your first mount sounded wrong, it likely just didn't make good contact. The second one also doesn't sound all that great, I would try again a few times with different mounting pressure and see if you can get load temps down into the 50's which is where I would expect it to be on stock clocks.

 

[fixbsod]

As pointed out, while 75 will work for 100% load on a 3960x you may want to shoot for a few deg less which can often be accomplished by rearranging little things, but I would NOT be shooting for an OC at that temp. That's like a max load temp ON an oc (or not much under)

 

[PCTC2]

Just another note, Corsair states on their H60 page that the pump was not designed to run at anything other than 100% RPM (~2000 RPM) and that running it slower is not recommended.

 

[T_Yamamoto]

isnt the h60 really....light for a 3960x?
if youre getting a highend cpu, get a highend cooler!

 

[Don Karnage]

If its idling at 50c its mounted wrong