Hot e6600 issue, looking for some advice

[Spike]

At a recent lan party a friend of mine's pc kept rebooting after a few hours of CS:S and he wanted to know why. I looked at it and after installing coretemp I noticed his e6600 was idling around 45-50c which seemed rather high to me. I ran prime95 and he was in the mid 50's in 2 seconds and up in the mid to upper 60's in less than 2 min. I pulled the pc apart and here is the basic cooling specs:

-Unknown Antec case with 5 120mm fans including one on the side right above the CPU.
-Basic Intel HSF with copper core.
-No filters so there was some dust buildup but not bad, mainly just on the trailing edge of fan blades.

I pulled off the Intel HSF and the thermal paste seemed pretty bad. I cleaned it all off, applied a very thin layer of AS 3 (another friend is borrowing my AS 5 right now) and remounted the HSF. His idle temps are now in the upper 30's but he is still getting to the mid 60's in less than 2 min with prime 95. I know there is a burn in time for AS but I was hoping this would cut it.

In the end I underclocked his CPU so he could continue playing for the night but that is just a temporary measure. What could be causing such high temps and how could I help? A new HSF is certainly not out of the question but those older model stock intel HSF's are not bad coolers. I'm using one on a E5200 (different core, I know) and have it overclocked to 3.4 with no problems at all and previously used it with an overclocked e6550, again, no issues.

Is there something else I'm missing that could be causing the problems? Oh, and as a FYI both speedfan and the BIOS pegged the intel HSF at 2300 rpm and nothing I could do would make that go faster, is that a normal speed for the stock cooler?

thanks!

 

[TidusZ]

Upper 60's isn't great but it wont cause rebooting, certainly not on an E6600. It may have happened in only two minutes, but running it 2 hours likely wouldn't make it go a whole lot higher. You could use speedfan http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php to increase fan speeds but honestly 2300 rpm is pretty darn fast and I imagine kinda loud. If you have more time to run p95 to see temps getting in the 80s and 90s and causing a reboot then I'd suggest go for a cheap hsf like the xigmatec or vendetta 2. From the sounds of it though, having 5 case fans, a stock E6600, a hsf that is free of dust, and temps in high 60's, I would think heat isn't really the issue here.

 

[Spike]

Originally posted by: TidusZ
Upper 60's isn't great but it wont cause rebooting, certainly not on an E6600. It may have happened in only two minutes, but running it 2 hours likely wouldn't make it go a whole lot higher. You could use speedfan http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php to increase fan speeds but honestly 2300 rpm is pretty darn fast and I imagine kinda loud. If you have more time to run p95 to see temps getting in the 80s and 90s and causing a reboot then I'd suggest go for a cheap hsf like the xigmatec or vendetta 2. From the sounds of it though, having 5 case fans, a stock E6600, a hsf that is free of dust, and temps in high 60's, I would think heat isn't really the issue here.

No offense but I really hope your wrong... if the problem is not the heat from the cpu then I have a whole crap load of other benchmarks and tests to run to find the issue and I was hoping to avoid that.

I was running speedfan and could not get it to increase (or decrease for that matter) the cpu fan speed so I just left it alone. And from what I have read upper 60's, low 70's for a e6600 is pretty dang hot and I should be concerned. Heck, my e6550 in a piece of crap Aspire Q-Pack 2 with only a single 120mm exhaust would not get above upper 50's and that was overclocked running prime 95 for 12 hours.

My plan is to run prime95 for 12 hours or until it has an error and just ignore the really high temps. If that won't produce an error perhaps memtest will show something and I can forget about heat as the main problem.

 

[zagood]

Too hot. Replace stock heatsink. But check voltages with CPU-Z just to make sure.

 

[Itchrelief]

Originally posted by: TidusZ
Upper 60's isn't great but it wont cause rebooting, certainly not on an E6600. It may have happened in only two minutes, but running it 2 hours likely wouldn't make it go a whole lot higher. You could use speedfan http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php to increase fan speeds but honestly 2300 rpm is pretty darn fast and I imagine kinda loud. If you have more time to run p95 to see temps getting in the 80s and 90s and causing a reboot then I'd suggest go for a cheap hsf like the xigmatec or vendetta 2. From the sounds of it though, having 5 case fans, a stock E6600, a hsf that is free of dust, and temps in high 60's, I would think heat isn't really the issue here.

Not an apples to apples comparison, but my e8500 with an improperly mounted stock HSF ran quite happily at 70C for a month while running 2x single core folding@home clients 24-7.

 

[Spike]

As an update he ran prime at stock speeds overnight with no errors, he is leaving it on throughout the day as well to give it a full 24 hours. This tells me the CPU is probably not the problem though he says the temps are hovering right around 80c which is much too hot for my taste. Regardless of what the problem comes out to I reccomended a new HSF for the cpu just to drop those temps some.

 

[TidusZ]

Yeah 80c is really bad for running prime 95 (as opposed to linpack), you've already remounted it with new paste. New heatsink makes sense imo.