sudden drop in CPU temperatures

[forumposter32]

Uh, this makes me feel a little odd. I put on a Zalman NB47J heatsink fan for my northbridge chipset and put an IDE "slave" connector away from the heatsink of the CPU. Now my temperatures have dropped up to 7'C.

Could that possibly be due to the fact that the cheap white thermal grease I put on is "curing"?

 

[ChiPCGuy]

Uh, I am not sure why you consider this a problem. Most TIMs will need a break-in period, and you will see a lowering of temps over time.

 

[forumposter32]

Well, I'm not complaining, just befuzzled (if that's a word).

BTW, what does TIM mean?

And when they talk about fans, what is CFM?

I have a Coolermaster 120 mm fan in front of my hard drive and it's only 11 CFM. Would that make any difference at all if I add another hard drive and it's a little warm?

 

[ElTorrente]

Did you use Arctic Silver 5? If so, that probably explains it. It takes supposedly 50-200 hours of use before it finally cures. They say to let the CPU cool down to ambient temps during this period- not to necessarily keep it on the whole time. I would imagine keeping it on the whole time would be where it needed 200hours to cure.. just a guess though.

I didn't think I would see much of a difference when I used AS5, but I saw about 5c between after it cured, and when I first applied it.

 

[forumposter32]

No, I just used the white crap that came with the Gigabyte Neon Cooler 8.

I'm a silly guy. I used the white crap that also came with the Zalman NB47J and I have 33'C when idle (although I do go up to 46'C when gaming).

Next time, I guess I might use Arctic Silver Ceramique because I read it's non-conductive. I'm too paranoid to use AS5. :Q

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Too bad you didn't measure the chipset-heatsink temperature before and after the Zalman NB installation. I would've been interested in the data.

With my cooling solutions, I proceeded on the assumption that the major components -- AGP/PCI-E, Northbridge chipset, memory and CPU, being connected by circuit traces, also conduct heat. Cool down the hottest -- hearts and minds will follow.

After ducting my motherboard, my chipset temperature -- only a couple degrees F either way from my GFX GPU's temp at the GPU HSF -- dropped 5 to 7F and within a couple degrees of the CPU heatsink base.

I'm refining my duct during a motherboard-swap with the same ASUS model. With my board, they used an aluminum chipset "passive" heatsink more like the Zalman, but with yours, it was a little flat sucker with a fan.