Whats the optimal operating tempature for an Athlon X2 4400

[Captain Insano]

Dual Core processor?


What is the standard temperature at idle for this type of processor? What about at full load?


What is ideal for a fan-cooled system, both at idle and full load?

Thanks!

[Captain Insano]

Oh another question...

In a standard ATX mid tower case with a front and rear 120MM fan what is the best direction for airflow?

The front case fan is on the bottom of the case, I currently have it pulling air in, and the rear case fan, which is at the top, blowing the hot air out, along with the power supply fans. The finally there is a CPU fan, and a door fan.

[Menlaan]

If you come to NT for advice, you're already fucked.

Okay, I know that people on NT are, in general, more knowledgeable about tech stuff than say relationships, BUT I've got to say WTF are doing starting a company purporting to take on Dell when you seem to not know anything whatsoever about computers?

[Captain Insano]

hahah... I didn't want to bias the post, but I have managed to get the computers I sell to operate with fan based cooling around 35 degrees celcius at idle, which is supposedly fantastic. I would just like to see where everyone else is at.

[Menlaan]

Okay, that makes more sense. I don't know enough about computers to either give advice or praise, but I'm glad you're not blindly asking someone else to design your computers one step at a time.

[Narrock]

Check Tomshardware.com

[Harrison]

35c with air cooling at idle?

[Captain Insano]

Yah.... Badass power supply with incoming and exhaust fans, two 120MM case fans, the front as an intake and rear as exhaust, Zalman CPU fan and case door fan.

Its for a high end system. The reason I brought this thread up is I want to get the standard more than anything. What is everyone else seeing?

I would also like to know how much of a difference water cooling makes.

At idle the thing is between 35-38C.

OH Before I forget... I tend to use SpeedFan and whatever temperature software comes with the MoBo to take my readings in addition to the BIOS readouts when designing systems.

Does anyone have any better suggestions than SpeedFan? From what I have read and experienced its the king.

[Harrison]

You have absolutely nothing to worry about if it's idling at 35-38c

Hell, if it was idling at 60c, I wouldn't worry a bit.

[Tikker]

Oh another question...

In a standard ATX mid tower case with a front and rear 120MM fan what is the best direction for airflow?

The front case fan is on the bottom of the case, I currently have it pulling air in, and the rear case fan, which is at the top, blowing the hot air out, along with the power supply fans. The finally there is a CPU fan, and a door fan.

you want to create negative pressure inside the case

each fan should have a measurement for CFM (cubic feet of air per minute, pushed)

just make sure that the CFM going out, is higher than the CFM going in

this is a pretty ok guide, and I love this site in general:
http://www.xoxide.com/computer-cooling.html

[Tikker]

hahah... I didn't want to bias the post, but I have managed to get the computers I sell to operate with fan based cooling around 35 degrees celcius at idle, which is supposedly fantastic. I would just like to see where everyone else is at.

I idle at around 31c, and under load top out at 40c, with my water cooling

on air I was at 27c idle, and 45-46c under load

I went water in an attempt to silence the pc, but it turned out I still needed teh case fans to move air across the passive heat sinks on the mobo (bleh)

ie, I spent $120 and didn't really gain fuck all in the process heh

temps aren't really all that important unless you're going to overclock


ie, running at 50c or 35c means fuck all in term of performance

it does make a bit of difference in the ambient temp of your computer room tho

ie, if its a big room, who gives a shit
if you're trying to put a machine in a small enclosed space, it makes a bigger difference

[Captain Insano]

thanks great info... I buy a LOT of stuff from Xoxide.

The cooling was a big deal to me, because I want to make 100 percent sure that the PC isn't slowly cooking. I have to warranty these things.

I'm stoked that its running that cool..It should really help with the longevity of the machine.

[vonkaar]

I figured you had a wholesale distributor, Ralf... Xoxide would be a ripoff in that case.

30° is good but you are relying on totally inaccurate temperature measurements, so... it really doesn't matter. The on-board thermistors often have an accuracy rating as bad as +/- 10°, with freaking BIOS flashes totally changing the readings. Until you get a real system to measure temps, I wouldn't worry about them at all.

If you are worried about stability, just run some burn-in programs in an attempt to fry your CPU. If it can handle F@H, SuperPi and 3dMark2006 concurrently, 5x in a row... it's stable enough for mass markets and it passes a test that Dell would NEVER dream of. Their stability test is called, "does it boot?"

[Granh]

Best I ever got my *water-cooling* was 36c while running 2 windows of EQ for a couple hours & F@H. Was a bad ass WC system which let me OC from 1800 to 2500 MHz. Its resting windows temp was around 27c, but if you get your fans anywhere near those kinds of temps you're going to have one loud ass computer.

If you're really interested in getting good temp info you can use what I had in that comp which is a temp gauge & fan control. It let me adjust the RPMs of 4 different fans and track the temp of my cpu. This one actually put a temp wire directly between the water-block and CPU so the readout is pretty damn accurate. Can pick them up pretty cheep if just wanted to test.

As for fan temps, anywhere between 40-50c is pretty good for fans only. For direction you'll want a through motion of the air. Fan or two in front pulling in, couple in back pulling out. For your door fan, if it doesn’t have one, get a funnel that moves the air not only on top of the CPU, but also tilted to blow towards your out fans. Keep all fans pointed in the same direction to keep new cold air constantly moving and nothing contradicting that motion. The fan on the power supply will help with the ambient temps, but again, the more fans you have going the louder this thing gets. No one likes a comp you can hear over your speakers. The good thing about that fan control I mentioned is it lets the user decide how loud they're willing to go vs. how cold they want their system, without changing any settings, hardware or rebooting. It also had a handy alarm you could set to go off if your temp reached a temp you set as too high. The thing was really good for keeping track of how the system temp changes over time rather than just "what is it now?".

[Captain Insano]

I figured you had a wholesale distributor, Ralf... Xoxide would be a ripoff in that case.

30° is good but you are relying on totally inaccurate temperature measurements, so... it really doesn't matter. The on-board thermistors often have an accuracy rating as bad as +/- 10°, with freaking BIOS flashes totally changing the readings. Until you get a real system to measure temps, I wouldn't worry about them at all.

If you are worried about stability, just run some burn-in programs in an attempt to fry your CPU. If it can handle F@H, SuperPi and 3dMark2006 concurrently, 5x in a row... it's stable enough for mass markets and it passes a test that Dell would NEVER dream of. Their stability test is called, "does it boot?"

Thanks that is awesome info. I acutally purchased 3dMark2006 two weeks ago. I'm going to start the tests tomorrow and I will also be running some Doom III tests.

I actually purchase a lot of stuff from various retail vendors...Mostly for testing purposes.

The high end stuff I use is almost NEVER available from the large distributors like Tech Data or Ingram Micro. Now as far as the guts of the compters I would say about 70 percent of the components come from large distributors, but the rest has to be bought retail until a deal is negotiated directly with the manufacturer.

Its funny, but even the distributors don't cut much off the price of full retail. To get real deals, you have to buy directly from China and Taiwan, which is just barely starting to happen for us.

[Captain Insano]

I figured you had a wholesale distributor, Ralf... Xoxide would be a ripoff in that case.

30° is good but you are relying on totally inaccurate temperature measurements, so... it really doesn't matter. The on-board thermistors often have an accuracy rating as bad as +/- 10°, with freaking BIOS flashes totally changing the readings. Until you get a real system to measure temps, I wouldn't worry about them at all.

If you are worried about stability, just run some burn-in programs in an attempt to fry your CPU. If it can handle F@H, SuperPi and 3dMark2006 concurrently, 5x in a row... it's stable enough for mass markets and it passes a test that Dell would NEVER dream of. Their stability test is called, "does it boot?"

hahaha... Maybe you can provide some insight into this... Back in the day I was working for EDS (Evil Data Systems)...They had one of those ISO 9000 certified labs and a big fancy KVM setup to test machines.

Now I never actually got to run the testing programs, but I am wondering what exactly these large companies are using to test their computers before they are shipped out? I have seen lots of pictures from TigerDirect , Dell, Newegg etc etc of these labs where they build their computers and do some sort of testing, but I am wondering what sort of tests they are actually putting these machines through? Is there some kickass hardware/software package that all the big guys use?

If anyone knows anything about this I would be interested to know.

[Captain Insano]

oh here we go: Tigerdirect's facility...

What do you think is taking place here?

<img src="http://images.tigerdirect.com/AboutUs/fact1.jpg">

[Tikker]

I figured you had a wholesale distributor, Ralf... Xoxide would be a ripoff in that case.

30° is good but you are relying on totally inaccurate temperature measurements, so... it really doesn't matter. The on-board thermistors often have an accuracy rating as bad as +/- 10°, with freaking BIOS flashes totally changing the readings. Until you get a real system to measure temps, I wouldn't worry about them at all.

If you are worried about stability, just run some burn-in programs in an attempt to fry your CPU. If it can handle F@H, SuperPi and 3dMark2006 concurrently, 5x in a row... it's stable enough for mass markets and it passes a test that Dell would NEVER dream of. Their stability test is called, "does it boot?"

hahaha... Maybe you can provide some insight into this... Back in the day I was working for EDS (Evil Data Systems)...They had one of those ISO 9000 certified labs and a big fancy KVM setup to test machines.

Now I never actually got to run the testing programs, but I am wondering what exactly these large companies are using to test their computers before they are shipped out? I have seen lots of pictures from TigerDirect , Dell, Newegg etc etc of these labs where they build their computers and do some sort of testing, but I am wondering what sort of tests they are actually putting these machines through? Is there some kickass hardware/software package that all the big guys use?

If anyone knows anything about this I would be interested to know.

you test an initial build, then just mass produce it after that


and sometimes you just look at other peoples test results for similar gear, call it close enough, and fire stuff out the door

[Captain Insano]

I think the answer you gave is pretty much dead on accurate. One of the things that gives me hope in this business is the fact that what these HUGE companies like Dell are doing, just isn't that difficult, and IMO can be done a lot better.

[Tikker]

i think you'll find that once you reach a certain size, and have to move xxxxx machines a month, you just don't have time to be as thorough as you'd like

[Minrott]

Time is part of it. But the other part of having a large company, shipping large amounts of product is that when you 1 error, you usually have 1,000 errors.

My company manufactures hard drive components. We ship millions a week. Our inspection procedures are extreme. Each part, every single one is inspected upwards of 10 times from beginning to end of our processes. From raw material to finished product.

However, simply because of the volume of our sales, if we ship a bad order to Toshiba or Western Digital, it's not one unit. Even if only one unit was actually bad, they send all 10,000 back. They don't have time to inspect them all, and they depend on us to sell them good parts so they don't have to. So all those parts come back to us, customer confidence is lost, they look at other suppliers, and we have to divert man hours to reinspecting and sorting those 10,000 parts.

Bottom line? DELL is a computer assembly plant. Nothing more. They are taking components from WD and Toshiba and Intel and others and putting them together in a package that according to specs on paper should work well together. Those components all were manufactured with parts by companies like mine. Companies like that, and companies that make the components themselves are where the real quality control is.

DELL expects that by buying components from certain companies, who buy their parts from other companies, that they will have an acceptable rate of failure on their bolted together machines.

I would not doubt for a second that after initial R and D of putting a machine together in a lab and running it until it fries is the sum amount of their testing for quality purposes, other than making sure every machine boots before it goes in the box.

[Captain Insano]

Thats pretty much what I have gathered from all my experience in this business.

What is going into the average Dell is really quite simple. I think where they really lose out is their shitty software loads and their horrid service. I don't expect them to fix that anytime soon. Anyhow...


I hope to have the capital someday to do some real R & D and develop some new technlogies. Just bolting stuff together isn't enough. I have a lot of ideas that I think could be big hits, but not the capital at the moment to pursue any of them.