It's getting hot in here... (Pent D 930)

[DrivenByDemons]

Well, I've always been a big AMD guy and have been building their systems since the 586 days... Never had any problems and actually fell way behind on Intel lingo because I never cared about their product. SOOO, I decided to get a new system cause I sold my old Socket A XP 3000+. Checked out newegg and saw some decent reviews on the Pentium D's and the price was right compared to AMD's offerings. I figure what the hell, I'll give the old 8088 company a try again and see what's up. I paired up a D 930 with an Intel 945PSn motherboard. I'm sorry with this decision, here's why...

I'm having temperature issues with this CPU. I know these things get hot but the BIOS and Intel's desktop utilities show different readings at idle. I have a Scythe Ninja w/ a 12cm fan and the BIOS shows 66C at idle, when I boot up and check it in desktop utilities it shows 53C. Why such a big difference??? When I load it up with prime95 on each core it shoots up to 72C real fast. I get warnings but it never throttles. Also the case temp reads like 45C even with the side off the case and a fan blowing right on the sensor. My room temp is WELL below that so I know that can't be right. Does anyone have this MB/CPU and are they seeing the same thing? I guess I shouldn't worry since it's not throttling but I've NEVER had temps this high on any system I've ever built. I'm confident the Ninja is mounted properly cause the temp drops off very quickly when I stop prime95. It'll go from 72C down to 58C in about 8-9 seconds. I also lapped the Ninja and the 930 and used some Artic Silver but still get these high temps. Could these sensors just be wrong??? I'm planning on backing up my DVD's to my Infrant NAS and will be doing a lot of XVID encoding. I don't want to fry this thing in 2 months...

 

[stevty2889]

Something definatly isn't right. Your sensors could be wrong. My 920 doesn't reach 66c load on the stock heatsink at 3.6ghz..my 805(smithfield core, so run at higher temps than 9xx) hit's 55c load on the scythe ninja at 3.6ghz. Are you sure it's not throttling? Did you run throttlewatch(which didn't seem to work right with the 8xx series), or S&M? Have you tried updating the bios? One of my friends had an Intel 915 chipset board that was reporting temps of like -100c on air cooling with a 3.6ghz Prescott, but bios update fixed it.

 

[DrivenByDemons]

yea, I ran throttlewatch while I was prime95'ing and it never throttled. I also updated to the latest BIOS (dated April 06). It's pissing me off now... I took a can of compressed air and blew it right on the heatsink of the Ninja while prime was running and it stayed rock solid at 72C. I'm tempted to turn the can of air upside down and spray liquid chloro-floro whatever right on it to freeze it just to see what would happen. I'm gonna try removing the ninja later and reseat it and maybe re-position the fan... I think the ninja is fine though since the temps drop so quickly when I quit prime95. The difference between the BIOS reading and the software reading is wierd too....

 

[Markfw]

throttlewatch doesn;t work on the 9xx and 8xx series. You need S&M for that.

 

[hardwareking]

maybe u put too much thermal paste or ur fan isn't mounted properly.installing lga 775 heatsinks can be a pain.
Why don't u try that before spraying the chloro-fluro whatever?
i use the pentium d 930 on stock heatsink and is oced to 3.6.And it doesn't go above 60C.
Gona oc further once i buy a 975x and a corsair nautilus.

 

[Furen]

Bios and Windows idle temperatures are always different. Windows sends the HLT command, the bios doesn't. Your sensors are probably inaccurate, though.

 

[DrivenByDemons]

Well, I lapped the heatsink and the 930 plus i applied the AS with a credit card and smoothed it out till you could almost see through it so I'm pretty damn sure the heatsink is attached properly. I have never experienced anything like this before. I'll try remounting everything and see what happens tonight... @ hardwareking, what stepping is your 930?

 

[ForgetCassettes]

I have a Pentium D 920 running at 4.0 Ghz using the Scythe Ninja. My idle temp is 43C and under dual prime 95 load, I get up to 63C. Initially, I installed the Scythe using a thin layer of AS and my temps weren't impressive. The second time I mounted it, I just placed a small drop of AS on the CPU and just mounted the Ninja, letting it spread itself out. That worked better in my case.

 

[hardwareking]

mine is B0.
i wish it was C1,but it aint.Those are only for the pentium d 960 and 965 presler and new pentium d's which don't have virtualization.

 

[pkme2]

Here are some temps.
http://www.gen-x-pc.com/cputemps.htm

Pentium usually run a little hotter than AMDs.
My previous P4 @ 55C/working temp and I thought that was normal.

 

[DrivenByDemons]

Originally posted by: ForgetCassettes
I have a Pentium D 920 running at 4.0 Ghz using the Scythe Ninja. My idle temp is 43C and under dual prime 95 load, I get up to 63C. Initially, I installed the Scythe using a thin layer of AS and my temps weren't impressive. The second time I mounted it, I just placed a small drop of AS on the CPU and just mounted the Ninja, letting it spread itself out. That worked better in my case.

Well, whoever lapped the heatsink and CPU (me) must have been a total moron (me). Also, whoever applied the AS (me) must have been on drugs that day (me). I finally got around to messing with this today and found that only the outer edges of the heatspreader on the CPU were contacting the heatsink. The heatspreader was still a little concave. That, plus not enough AS resulted in not enough contact with the CPU. I did as ForgetCassettes suggested and just put a drop of AS right in the middle of the CPU and all is mo' betta... 43 at idle and 63 at full load on both cores. Those temps are with 1 800RPM scythe fan on the Ninja so I'm pretty happy now. I'm gonna replace that fan with a 1200RPM model just to get a little lower. Thanks for the help and wanted to post my solution for anyone else having the same trouble as me...

 

[DrivenByDemons]

Oh yea, is it true throttlewatch won't work on this D 930? I downloaded S7M 1.8.1 beta and I can't see where it shows if the CPU is throttling...

 

[Roy Andrews]

I used ThrottleWatch on my Pentium D 930 @ 4GHz while running an instance of Prime95 on each core. Temperatures were hitting 75 degrees C with a 1.4V VCORE and ThrottleWatch was showing spikes of 11% throttling (I'm assuming this means that 11 out of every 100 cycles were idle, which makes me think performance would be lacking).

I disabled throttling in my BIOS, dropped the VCORE 1.35V and now my max temperature at full load on each core is 72 degrees C. Still warm. But whatever.

Asus P5LD2, Intel Pentium D 930 @ 4GHz with stock cooling, Prime95 stable so far for just over two hours.