Cooling the Quad Core Machine
11/17/07
I have been a big fan of Arctic Silver heat sink grease for some time. Today I plan to first open the case and see if the machine runs any cooler. Then remove the heatsinks and clean the stock heat sink grease off and replace it with Arctic Silver 5. I will then report what temperature changes we have made. Stay tuned. Oh and we are starting off with temperatures, as reported by CoreTemp, ranging from 55 to 65 Celcius.
Ok first problem. I opened the case while the machine was running to see if more air flow would help the fans. However the first thing that happened was the fans revved up to full speed. Full speed is a good thing.. however the noise is not. It sounds like a jet engine running over there. I found a case intrusion switch that of course opens when you open the case. By pushing that the fans go back to their normal speed. So I will figure a way to jumper it to test the open case temps. Then decide what to do.
Well of course with the fans thundering away my temps dropped dramatically and so did my hearing. Temps were seen from 47 to 54. So that is good. The sound of course is not. I taped the switch closed and the fans have now slowed back down. The temperatures have climbed almost back to where we started even with the side of the case off. So... guess adding a fan to the side of the case would not be a big benefit although I am still thinking I should do it. I like a case with more air coming in than going out. Positive air pressure is only slightly less efficient in cooling yet reaps big rewards in keeping dust out of the machine. So sooner or later the case cover will probably get an intake fan with filter I might add.
11/18/07
Well I took the heat sinks off and cleaned the old grease off them and the processors. I then spread a light coat of Arctic Silver 5 on them. Put it all back together and temps were about the same. Now we all know that it takes some time for the heat sink paste (AS5) to break in but I looked it up on the Artic Silver site and it said it might take as much as 200 hours. I don't feel like waiting 200 hours so I just let it run over night. This morning the temps were still about the same so I took her apart and installed two 80mm exit fans in the spaces provided on the back of the case. Temps seem to have dropped. Now seeing 54 to 60 C in CoreTemp. So thats a bit better. I am still concerned about dust so will eventually take apart the case and see if I can install filters on the intake fan. So to summarize:
Stock box temps shown 58 to 67 C
Added fans temps shown 54 to 60 C
Now this is very preliminary. I just fired it up after installing the fans and really probably shouldn't have published them. I will report more after it has been running for a few hours.
11/19/07
The machine has been running a day and a half now and the temps have fluctuated some. I really was impressed with the original Dell heat sink grease. I think they may have even been using AS5. As we see the temps didn't drop till I added fans. So my replacing their grease with AS5 might have been a waste of time. However that is the object of all this writing. I find modifications that don't need to be made so you the reader don't waste your time. So it is still a success in my opinion.
I am now in touch with Dell support and am very hopeful they have some sort of tool for controlling the fans and reading more than just the CPU temps. I am hopeful we can come up with some sort of utility to monitor and control the temperatures in this machine. After all this is turning out to be quite a good folding box and if we can keep her cool while running at 100% she will turn out work units for many years.
My plan at this point is to watch the temps for a few more days. Then when I am satisfied that we have a stable temperature reading we will decide what to proceed to next. I am still looking into virtual machines and running a couple of VM's with Linux on them and seeing if they fold any faster. Speaking of faster, all these temperature experiments have had no affect on folding times or points per day. These modifications are strictly for reliability and stability. So far so good.
11/20/07
First of all let me tell you I am absolutely thrilled with this Dell SC1430 machine. It is well constructed, runs very strong, and is quiet. Besides the fact that it uses half the wattage of my old system and produces 4 times the power. This is a folders dream. I am seriously considering another one. I am even thinking of putting in some low power Penryn's (L5430's or some such) if I can get my hands on some. That should make this machine fold more and use even less wattage. The wattage issue is a big deal to me as my electrical budget is not without limits.
Now my quest for information about getting control of the fans and temperature sensor information is taking a bit longer. I received word from tech support tonight that I need to contact their sales department to get this info. A bit frustrating as I had hoped to work on this over the Thanksgiving holidays but not totally unexpected. Typical of a big bureaucratic company, many departments to go through till you finally find the guy that knows the answers. Still I must say I get prompt responses to emails and such from tech support so I am very happy about that. I hate companies that don't respond to emails. Companies on my list of bad guys are Iwill, SuperMicro, and Harah's corporation. All three of which ignored several of my emails. I consider that a cardinal sin in the computer industry.
Temps are still stable at 56 to 62 degrees. I hope to get them lower but that is well below the published specs for these processors. I will report more when I know more.
11/30/07
I have watched the temps for several days now making sure the thermal paste is broke in and to be sure everything is stable. To be honest the above reported temperatures of 56 to 62C stayed pretty much the same. Might have been a slight lowering but not too noticable. Realize of course I am watching 8 temperatures, one for each core. I have been just eyeballing the numbers and reporting the high and the low.
Today I decided to add 2 more fans. I will get you a picture of this shortly but here is what I did. There isn't much room around these heatsinks for fans. On one side are the FB-DIMMS and the other are some capacitors and chokes on the motherboard that stick up in the way. So I couldn't put my old trusty panaflow 80mm fans in there. I stumbled across a couple of 40mm Thermaltake fans I had off an old P3 setup and took a look to see if they might go in there. Sure enough they fit just fine. Although not as many CFM as the 80mm panaflows I guess I will have to be satisfied with that at least for the time being. Temperatures look to be markedly lower but she has only been running a few minutes. After an hour or so I will look more at the temperatures and report here. Oh and after adding the rear two fans last time I forgot to check the power consumption. So I will have to give you power used after all 4 fans have been installed instead of two at a time. Guess I skipped a step there.
Ok a couple of hours have passed and temps are pretty stable. Temperatures have dropped to a range of 51-58C. Thats down at least 4 more degrees Celsius. Now as far as power goes we have gone up 10 watts to 243w. Remember that we have added 4 fans and that accounts for the extra 10 watts. Its getting late but tomorrow afternoon we are going to overclock the CPU's from 1.6ghz to 2.0. But for now I need some sleep.
12/2/07
Ok here is a picture of the insides with the new fans.
You can see the black fan mounted on the right heatsink. The black plastic cage below it in the picture is the housing for the 120mm intake fan. Of course I have another fan for the other heatsink. These 40mm fans dropped the temps as noted above.
Here is a side view of the heatsink out of the case.
The fan is the Thermalright Volcano 5 rated 4550 rpm and 32CFM at 31dba.
Ok tonight I finally did the BSEL mod. See the link for full details. Oh and the Woodcrest details are the same as this Clovertown chip. That is I put tape over the G30 pad on the CPU. Ok on BOTH CPU's. This boosts the FSB to 1333 instead of 1066 that the E5310's were designed for. Thus my new frequency is up from the stock 1.6ghz to 2.0ghz. I have also noticed the points per day of my folding program is now up around 3655 well above the 2950 I used to get with the stock 1.6ghz CPU. Great little folder here and we are approaching a real nice folding machine with a minimum cost factor. Good stuff. Oh and we are now using more electricity. Guess you can't have your cake and eat it too. Now we have risen to 265 watts. Still far below the wattage of my old machine.
So here is a recap.
Added 2 80mm fans at the back of the case
Added 2 40mm fans on the heatsinks
boosted CPU frequency from 1.6ghz to 2.0ghz (by BSEL mod)
Power usage has gone up to 265 watts
I don't want to report temperatures just yet. I had to redo some of the heatsink thermal grease (AS5) so the temps haven't stabilized. I will say they have gone up several degrees celsius.
12/16/07
Well I have watched the temps for a couple of weeks now and didn't like them. High temps of up to 67c on one core down to 57c on some of the others. I thought maybe they would go down with time but they didn't. Tonight I decided to take the heatsinks back off and take a look. I saw sketchy contact between the Arctic Silver and the heatsink. It was also pointed out to me that Arctic Silver has a different procedure for applying the heatsink grease on these quad cores. Although I was skeptical I looked it up on their site and found sure enough instead of applying a very thin coat of grease on the CPU they want you to put a small line of heatsink grease down the middle of the CPU. Here is a link to their description. Their picture of the CPU isn't QUITE the same as mine and I have emailed them due to the difference but basically you can see in the picture how to apply the grease.
Now the interesting thing is... after reinstalling the heatsinks and applying the grease according to AS's instructions my temps are dramatically down. It has only been running about 3 hours now but my highest CPU temp is now 61C with my lowest being 54C. So that is quite a bit lower than the 67C I had. So as long as these temps stay down below 60C (well mostly) I think I am done. I am planning on adding two more fans to suck air out the back side of the heatsinks. That is about all I can do unless I go to watercooling. Oh and I have some other fans that mount in a 5 1/4 inch bay (see here) that I might try to exit more air. Just to see if I have a hotspot. I would really like to see all the cores running below 60C.
12/17/07
Well my hats off to Arctic Silver. As I mentioned above the picture on Arctic Silver's site is slightly different than my CPU. So for accuracy sake I emailed AS and told them of the discrepancy. I will be darned but today I got a nice email back from a Mr. Colin Thompson at Arctic Silver that thanked me for the tip and they will look into it. Now that's a company that's in the electronic age. I just LOVE companies that actually read and respond to email. Especially in such short time. Arctic Silver just went way up in my opinion. Of course I already did think they were the best...
Now to the news... after running all night the temps remained around 61 high and 54 low. So today I added the Twin Turbo TT-900 bay fan (link above) to see if my case was holding things back. Bad news... even though this fan pulls 800 CFM of air it hasn't affected the CPU temps one bit. Still the same range for now. Guess I will have to add a couple fans on the back side of the heatsink as my next test. By the way ... adding the fans did not change my power consumption much. Now burning 267 watts at full load. Good news there.