MM U2-UFO and Horizon: The never ending 2 in 1 worklog (56k warning)

[ranker]

Hey Ranker, have you tried getting the ambient temp using one of the digital sensors on your bigNG? I have one of those outside my tower on a neutral spot, and I think that'd be the best way to read ambient.

Getting ambient temps from weather/news is useless IMO because it may have nothing to do with your particular room. PC rooms can be saunas with poor AC, or arctics with good ACs. So your ambient will vary considerably vs outdoor ambient.

What you mentioned about rad placement and cold air intake may be very important as well. Cold air on intake will make a huge difference and I think the difference could be exponential. I think that the deltas between idle/load will be different at low ambient vs high ambient temps. If you can try getting your room to good ambient temps and your rads with good cold intake that might solve your issue.

Thanks for the tip. I'll probably place one of the digital sensors in a neutral location to get a more accurate reading of ambient temps inside the case. As of right now I'm relying soley on the motherboard sensor to tell me what my ambient temps are.

The only reason why I mentioned the news/weather ambient temps is because my motherboard reports temps even higher than both my Tcase and my Tjunction! Now, I did some research and some mentioned that Foxconn's (they manufacture 75% of all Nvidia boards such as EVGA's, XFX's, etc) TIM used for the mosfets might not make contact completely with the heatsink resulting in higher motherboard temps. I went ahead and purchased the Alphacool regular universal MOSFET waterblock and a few extra mosfet heatsinks. I hope this helps because my motherboard temps a strangely high. We'll see if its accurate by using the BigNG's digital sensor.

Another problem is that my Tcase (CPU) and Tjunction (Core 1, Core 2) temps are almost the same. In all my other builds, the reported Tjunction temps were always 15C higher than the Tcase. I'm wondering why on this specific motherboard, I don't see this happening. I double checked my other water builds in my house, even another 680i build and everyone of them reported core temps to be about 12-18C higher than the CPU temps. I'm stumped on how come this isn't the case with my current machine.

Nothing tops hitting the books. BTW, I've been requested to be part of Rudy's campaign.. lol

ranker,

There is something I found out two weeks ago, and you may want to give this a try. No guarantees, but it worked well for me.

I was frustrated with the high mobo temps, even though I'm watercooling the full nine yards. Then I thought things through. Its not just the NB and mosfets that matter. The bottom line is that I rigged two Zalman fan brackets and somehow squeezed in two Antec SpotCools. Doesn't sound like much.. and it sure is an ugly mess.. but it worked miracles. The resulting effect was a 10C drop in the reported mobo temps. And what do you know.. I gained about 30 mHz in overclocking headroom.

Summary.. it sounds stupid, but fan cooling the waterblocks and mobo electronics helps considerably with stability.

BTW, the Antec SpotCools on the low setting put out twice the fan flow than the Corsair ram fans.. and are quieter too. On paper, the specs are very wimpy.. but that stuff works. Its not good if you want to show off your PC though.. its ugly.

I have some extra coolspots lying around that I'll try utilizing. However, I think I'm going to WC the mosfets with the Alphacool waterblock. I just hope it fits. I found that my motherboard sensor reports about a 42C boot up temp and then slowly climbs its way up to about 52C after about 15 minutes of being on. I'm not sure how to explain this. My associates are telling me its a combination of the high voltage Dominator Ram sticks, 2 8800GTX furnaces, 4 hard drives putting out heat and even my new Auzentech X-Fi Prelude 7.1 sound card (although I've never heard of a sound card putting out heat!)

This is only common sense, those aren't the only things on the MoBo making heat. I had to explain this fact many times to the n00bs over at DD forums who wanted to go with only the rad fans. Every dang chip on the MoBo is making heat of some kind. Little or no air running over them and the MoBo can get really cranky.


So your responsible for this mess we're in!!

Ron Paul FTW!

As of right now I have a corsair dominator fan, and 3 case fans directed towards cooling the motherboard without any radiators attached to it. My Horizon came with an original top that has 2 fans mounted at the top to vent out all hot air. It also has a motherboard try fan to vent it out horizontally as well. I'm pretty sure I have decent air flow with over 8 120mm case fans. The only thing I'm worried about is if its in the optimal configuration.