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Ow, hot, hot, hot!

dkm777

Senior member
Since I reached a million point in Folding, I decided to take a break and do something else. So I installed BOINC and started doing PrimeGrid and Collatz Conjecture. But... I ran into thermal problems - after just half an hour my CPU cores peaked at 80 degrees C. That's ridiculous! Nothing I ever ran before - Prime95, IBT, Folding, video encoding - made my CPU heat up this much. Is this normal for Intel CPUs to run hotter under PrimeGrid or anything else running via BOINC? Thing is I ordered a Cogage Arrow for my AMD rig and it should be arriving shortly, but I'll probably end up using it for my Intel box instead. It's supposed to be better than my Venomous-X and even slightly better than a Noctua NH-D14 with the right fans. Or maybe I should abandon all hope of running BOINC on my Intel rig?
 
I'm not sure about the the Intels, as I only have core i laptops and avoid running PG on them (except for short duration races), but for my X6, the core temps will go up 5-7 deg. C when I'm running PG WUs instead of SIMAP or WCG. I keep my resource share on PG lower than other projects, so I 'll never have more than ~2 cores running it at the same time (but again, I will change these settings for PG races).

To give you some solid numbers, my X6 runs 49-53C (depending on the season) when running WCG/SIMAP, and usually 56-60C on PG, which is a bit hotter than I would generally like. It's a 1090T with a slight OC on it (@3.4), and am using a CoolerMaster Hyper TX3 (small case, couldn't fit the 212). BTW, that's with all cores running PG WUs, and max CPU utilization set to 85%.
 
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Yes, PrimeGrid runs somewhere between 3 - 8ºC hotter than most other projetcs on a single core CPU. A multicore CPU gets hotter not by 3 - 8ºC but by more ... that why in PG races the organizers emphesize the need to cool the CPUs well, to decrease OC, etc. Om my i7-860 running @ 3.4GHz PG the temp approches aprox 85ºC, which is OK. I have had my CPUs running 24/7 for up to 10 days without ill effects and the CPUs are still going strong ... 100% load, 8 threads, almost no errors at all ...
 
If PrimeGrid ran hotter than Prime95, then you didn't run Prime95 right. Try the small FFT test and you should get the same heat results.
 
Looks like all is not lost. I went in the BIOS to fiddle with voltages and saw that I forgot to lower them after I ran my i7 at 4.2GHz for a short while. Now the temps are more manageable - low 70s.
 
If PrimeGrid ran hotter than Prime95, then you didn't run Prime95 right. Try the small FFT test and you should get the same heat results.

For those of you with sandy bridge or ivy bridge chips, the latest version of prime95 has been optimized for the AVX instruction set. I think most of the Primegrid apps are AVX optimized so they run very hot on AVX enabled chips. The latest version of Prime95 should be a better predictor of the temps you can expect if you decide to join in on the primegrid races.

http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft/
 
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