My New Build - Queries

[Hunain]

Hey folks, been a long time since I posted here, been busy and life moves on and stuff Anyways, Built a new PC and wanted feedback from folks here regarding performance, build, temperatures.

Here is what I got

Processor - C2D e6300 @ 3.0Ghz (my old Processor, OC'd)
Ram - Corsair XMS2 2X1gb
Graphics Card - XFX GTX 260 Black Edition Factory OC, core-680, Memory-1000, Shader-1466
PSU - Cooler Master Silent Pro M600, 40a 12v rail
Case - Cooler Master CM690II Plus

Temperatures - (Its really hot in summer where I am)
CPU idles at 54C, at load goes upto 65C.
Motherboard - 45C to 50C
GPU idles at 57C - 72C load (is this okay for this card?)

Performance
1M Super Pi takes 18.375 seconds.
Crysis Warhead gives 38fps average on all settings gamer and 2xAA
Assassins Creed II and Just Cause 2 (Love this game) run on max settings, smooth.
Just Cause 2 - 16AF, 16XAA, All settings Max, gives 35 fps average, 21fps minimum
Call of duty 4 gives a constant 125fps with all settings max, 4xAA,16xAF,Promod Tweaks on.

All in all, is this an okay setup? Performance is as expected? CPU bottleneck? Temperatures are okay?
Is the PSU sufficient? does it give room for upgrade? Any other feedback would be valuable too. Thanks in advance!

[Ulti]

Temperature for the motherboard and GPU are perfectly fine, however temperature for the processor is a bit hot, IIRC the max temp was 62 degrees for it. That is a mega overclock though as it was 1.86ghz or something at stock, what cooler are you using? You may want to look into getting a better cooler but I'm guessing you're using a half decent one already and if you have no heat problems related to the CPU then you could just leave it I guess.

Performance sounds about right, however, what resolution are you running at?

I don't think the CPU is bottlenecking just yet but if you were to upgrade then the CPU would be one thing to look at (or the RAM if you're using vista or windows 7 with 64 bit).

PSU is fine and it should give room to upgrade to a high end graphics card easily as well as a quad/hex core.

[Champman99]

My Core 2 Duo is overclocked from 2.13ghz to 3.2ghz and runs about 40-45 at load with a Titan Fenrir and Arctic Silver 5 - but I would guess my ambiant temperatures are not too high, (well except for today when it was boiling!)

Then again, your temps arent getting anywhere near any sort of safety threshold or anything, so its not really a big deal. I doubt you've got much of a CPU bottleneck with that overclock, most games are GPU limited although that is a bit of a generalisation with regards to genre and resolution.

The only possible upgrade I might suggest is looking into 4GB of RAM, thats what most people are using on gaming systems (6GB if Triple channel like an i7) on here at least - although RAM prices are high at the moment. Of course that assumes you are using a 64-bit OS to actually utilize that much RAM.

[Cheapy]

Like its been said before CPU runs hot.

For graphics I can definatly say that those are resonable temps if you havnt changed the fan settings on it. Mines a stock clocked GTX 260 and I had to use rivatuna to change the fan profile to get temps like those you have.

[SiM]

Bro!!! welcome back! How is the conquest to find the sexiest CPU cooler going?

[Hunain]

Thanks for the feedback guys, okay couple of questions.

Firstly, the temperature where I am, averages, during the day, between 35 - 40C! Thats Hot, considering this, are the temperatures okay?

I am using an aftermarket ASUS cooler to cool the CPU.

The casing has excellent airflow, but I would like some guidance, the front and top is grilled, plenty of breathing room. The Front has a 120mm intake, the top has 140mm exhaust, the back has 120mm exhaust, the left panel has two 120mm slots, I have installed two led fans, the lower one is intake and the upper one is exhaust. The case still has room for 3 more 120mm fans Any suggestions for setting up a better airflow?

Question about Memory, If I go 4gb, Can I retain the 2x1gb sticks and put another 1x2gb stick? or do I need another pair of 1gb ones?

Plus, the vid card has 896mb of memory I think, and 2gb ram is installed, my OS is windows 7 32bit, not much use then?

About 64-bit, do most new games etc work on 64-bit? Any issues or things to look out for before you consider getting 64-bit OS? Performance increases?

Finally, I wish to upgrade the processor, my current motherboard can support a Quad Core, but If I have to upgrade to an i3,i5 or i7, ill need new mobo, is the upgrade worth it? I might get the i5, since it has 4 cores.

Again, the PSU I have, can it support the setup with an i5 or i7 thrown in?

I know, alot of questions, thanks for answering though!

@SiM - Man I gave it up im looking into water cooling now! lol, will post pics of my new SEXY build soon!

[Queelis]

Firstly, the temperature where I am, averages, during the day, between 35 - 40C! Thats Hot, considering this, are the temperatures okay?

Yup, that is indeed very hot, so nothing will get you to idle at 40 degrees (save for Peltier coolers, but I think those have vanished from the market)

The casing has excellent airflow, but I would like some guidance, the front and top is grilled, plenty of breathing room. The Front has a 120mm intake, the top has 140mm exhaust, the back has 120mm exhaust, the left panel has two 120mm slots, I have installed two led fans, the lower one is intake and the upper one is exhaust. The case still has room for 3 more 120mm fans Any suggestions for setting up a better airflow?

Strange things with the side panel - I think those two fans just mess up the front-to back airflow. I'd just make them exhaust or remove them altogether.

Question about Memory, If I go 4gb, Can I retain the 2x1gb sticks and put another 1x2gb stick? or do I need another pair of 1gb ones?

A pair of 1GB ones would still make the memory work in dual channel mode, what may increase performance a bit.

Plus, the vid card has 896mb of memory I think, and 2gb ram is installed, my OS is windows 7 32bit, not much use then?

You'd need 64-bit OS to use 4GB of RAM, otherwise you'll only see ~3GB.

About 64-bit, do most new games etc work on 64-bit? Any issues or things to look out for before you consider getting 64-bit OS? Performance increases?

Vista 64-bit for a year here, haven't encountered anything that wouldn't work on it, save for Unlocker (but the 64-bit version is undeway). ALL new games work on 64-bit, just some specific apps may not (e.g. Unlocker, UltimateDefrag). If an application is built specifically for 64-bit, it may work faster (e.g. X264 64-bit encoder is some 5% faster).

Finally, I wish to upgrade the processor, my current motherboard can support a Quad Core, but If I have to upgrade to an i3,i5 or i7, ill need new mobo, is the upgrade worth it? I might get the i5, since it has 4 cores.

You would need new RAM as well, since the i* CPUs only support DDR3, you have DDR2. Just throw in a Core2Quad in there, those are still very potent processors

Again, the PSU I have, can it support the setup with an i5 or i7 thrown in?

Easily.

[scaryjim]

Strange things with the side panel - I think those two fans just mess up the front-to back airflow. I'd just make them exhaust or remove them altogether.

I'd heard this too. Perhaps you could move the fans to have another intake fan near the front and another exhaust fan at the rear? It's probably best to have all the airflow going in the same basic direction.

Vista 64-bit for a year here, haven't encountered anything that wouldn't work on it, save for Unlocker (but the 64-bit version is undeway). ALL new games work on 64-bit, just some specific apps may not (e.g. Unlocker, UltimateDefrag). If an application is built specifically for 64-bit, it may work faster (e.g. X264 64-bit encoder is some 5% faster).

Not only will most new games run on 64-bit, most old games will as well. I've successfully run NeverWinter Nights, Diablo 2, StarCraft, Warcraft 3... all sorts of older stuff on 64bit Windows 7. There will be the odd application that will just refuse to run for some reason, but the whole WOW64 thing seems to do the job more often than not...

[Ulti]

Thanks for the feedback guys, okay couple of questions.

Firstly, the temperature where I am, averages, during the day, between 35 - 40C! Thats Hot, considering this, are the temperatures okay?

I am using an aftermarket ASUS cooler to cool the CPU.

The casing has excellent airflow, but I would like some guidance, the front and top is grilled, plenty of breathing room. The Front has a 120mm intake, the top has 140mm exhaust, the back has 120mm exhaust, the left panel has two 120mm slots, I have installed two led fans, the lower one is intake and the upper one is exhaust. The case still has room for 3 more 120mm fans Any suggestions for setting up a better airflow?

Question about Memory, If I go 4gb, Can I retain the 2x1gb sticks and put another 1x2gb stick? or do I need another pair of 1gb ones?

Plus, the vid card has 896mb of memory I think, and 2gb ram is installed, my OS is windows 7 32bit, not much use then?

About 64-bit, do most new games etc work on 64-bit? Any issues or things to look out for before you consider getting 64-bit OS? Performance increases?

Finally, I wish to upgrade the processor, my current motherboard can support a Quad Core, but If I have to upgrade to an i3,i5 or i7, ill need new mobo, is the upgrade worth it? I might get the i5, since it has 4 cores.

Again, the PSU I have, can it support the setup with an i5 or i7 thrown in?

I know, alot of questions, thanks for answering though!

@SiM - Man I gave it up im looking into water cooling now! lol, will post pics of my new SEXY build soon!

Yup there's no way you can get your chip much lower then, it's already doing pretty good with only roughly 20-25 degrees above ambient at load.

I'd advise you to use the side panel as intakes though but obviously you could do a test with 10 minute intervals to check what the temperatures are, for me my case only has a 1 fan on the side panel and I have it blowing in on the graphics card, as my graphics card is a dual slot one with the air venting to the back, blowing in on it helps more than blowing out. I then have the typical front to back airflow with my front (intake) and back exhaust but with my top 2 fan slots, I have the one behind the CPU as the exhaust and the one above the RAM as an intake, I've figured using them both as an exhaust does not change temperatures at all for the CPU so I have it blowing over the RAM, cooling it down whilst providing cool airflow for the CPU cooler.

As the video card is almost 1GB, you'll probably see between 2.5GB-3GB of RAM so getting another 2x2GB sticks isn't worth it. I've been using Windows 7 64 bit for quite a while now and whenever I encounter things that don't work, I just set it on compatibility mode with full admin access, I'm sure that as you're on Windows 7 32 bit mode you're probably used to that so there's not gonna be any differences.

Like I said before, the PSU will handly one high end graphics card such as a 5870 (or two mid end graphics cards e.g. crossfire 5770) along with an overclocked i5/i7 easily. I doubt you'd need to change the whole platform though if you're only gaming, getting something like a E8400 would be good enough for gaming and then more RAM/better graphics card. i3 is definitely not worth the money IMO and i5 is only required for CPU intensive programs and games don't really tend to be CPU bottlenecked.

[Hunain]

Okay, update, after reading the kind replies, before Ulti's, I went on to modify the case airflow, added one extra fan on top, a GPU cooling slot and took one fan off the side panels and installed above the HDD frame. This time im back with pictures, and I am not sure if this is okay, plus its a tedious job changing fans and directions then monitoring temperatures, specially when it gets progressively hotter here during the day. My last post indicated that ambient was 34C, now it is 41C Anyways, here are the pictures, would appreciate if folks can tell me if this is the most efficient or not, btw, the case is open for pictures only, I close it for use.

Arrows Indicate Fans with their flows, a total of 7 fans, 2x140mm, 4x120mm and 1x80mm GPU Slot.








Points to Note: With this airflow, the CPU is atm, idling at 53C, though I downclocked it to 2.8Ghz. I put Orthos on, full load, the CPU temperature after about 7minutes of full load, reaches 65C, then the battle between hot air production and exhaust starts, the temperature then falls to 63, then back up to 65. After about 15 minutes, the max it reaches is 66C, fluctuating between 64 - 66C. At this point, the individual core temps are higher, at 72 each. As Ulti mentioned, the highest for this Processor is 65C, hence, am I to worry about burning it out? As far as I remember, people used to run these at temps higher than 65C on full load. The GPU is now idling at 58-60C, on load goes upto 71C max.

As for performance increase, since folks said CPU upgrade wont help much in gaming, This processor is running on 2.8Ghz dual core and I already have good ram and I think the GTX 260 Black Edition is a good card There is nothing more I can do for gaming performance?

Thank you so much to everyone for replying and helping me out here, plus, also let me know what you think of the case, looks wise

[Queelis]

The airflow looks very good, I doubt there's anything more to improve the cooling (or, in your case, heating ) of the internals.

You can get an SSD to improve load times, otherwise not much else. And if you're running the 15" monitor that's in your "My System", you don't even need half the card or CPU you have

On the case: my eyes! Need sunshades to look at it For each his own, I guess

[Hunain]

LOL Thanks, well, I really have no idea what more I can do, maybe fix more fans to the bottom mounts, there is space for 2 more.

As for the shades the LEDs actually look washed out in my cell phone camera photos, they are not so bright in reality

Plus, what about the question regarding the CPU? Should I worry about burning it out?

[Mithrandir]

Just for info, I have an e6300 Oc'd to 2.9ghz. Today it's pretty toasty in my room (29 degrees) and currently the cpu is around 60-62 degrees. It was cooler this morning and after an hour's UT3 online session it was showing the following temps:




Usually it idles around 40-45 degrees and under load around 60 degrees.

I have also ran IBT/Linx tests previously and the temps exceeded 70 degrees.
I'va always thought it was okay up to 80-85 degrees.
Personally I think my readings aren't very accurate as the air that exhausts from the PC is only warm if anything and nothing similar to the air that came out of my previous Athlon rigs.

[kalniel]

At this point, the individual core temps are higher, at 72 each. As Ulti mentioned, the highest for this Processor is 65C, hence, am I to worry about burning it out? As far as I remember, people used to run these at temps higher than 65C on full load. The GPU is now idling at 58-60C, on load goes upto 71C max.

You don't need to worry about burning it out - the CPU will downclock and undervolt itself before this ever happened. But it might slow down as a result. Each processor variant has different limits, so what might be fine for another chip would be different for your exact model.

As for performance increase, since folks said CPU upgrade wont help much in gaming, This processor is running on 2.8Ghz dual core and I already have good ram and I think the GTX 260 Black Edition is a good card There is nothing more I can do for gaming performance?

You are probably GPU limited - simple test is to change resolution and see if the performance changes. If it does, then you won't improve gaming without getting a better card.

[momo77735]

Im not too sure about your airflow? Have the top 2 fans blowing into the case see what happens and also have the side panel blowing inwards too.

[rkingb]

Im not too sure about your airflow? Have the top 2 fans blowing into the case see what happens and also have the side panel blowing inwards too.

I disagree - the top 2 should be extracting since hot air rises.