I'd been having some stability problems with my computer for the past few days and I finally found the cause. Summer's officially here, and the ambient temperature of my home computer lab has risen enough that my new Athlon 3000+ CPU was overheating. What to do?
Well my buddy Cypren (who also set me up on this new server!) recommened that I head to Fry's and get some Arctic Silver high-performance thermally conductive compound to replace the thermal grease than came packaged with my heat sink and cooling fan. I was skeptical that changing the compound would drastically affect the temperature of my CPU, but I was wrong.
I'm running a lot of simulations for my PhD and they really push the processors of my computers to their limit. According to the internal temperature diode of my Athlon the core temp was up to 146F during full CPU utilization, and I think that was an underestimate. This afternoon I removed the CPU, wiped off the old thermal grease, and applied some Arctic Silver 5 ($20 at Fry's, ouch).
What a difference! I've been running for eight hours now with no instability, and my core temp is holding steady at 120F! I can't believe what a huge difference Arctic Silver made. 26F is a huge drop. The Blue Screens of Death are gone!
Hey... are you aware that your email seems to be on the fritz?
Nope, I wasn't aware of that. What happened? Did an email bounce? It may be related to my recent domain name transfer.
This is not a product spam, I swear.
I built a pretty nifty computer a couple of months ago, and used Arctic Silver Ceramique, which is similar but doesn't conduct electricity.
As I was looking around at components to use, I was also struck by the importance of a good heatsink/fan. If you're using a stock model, it might be worth checking out.
Since I'm also conscious about the noise my computer gives off, I went with this Zalman model, and have been very happy with it. Might be worth checking out.
http://www.xtremetek.com/reviews/index.php?id=57
I wonder, could the dramatic decrease in core temperature also be due to better distribution of the thermal paste? I just set up a server based on the Athlon64 3300+, and the instruction sheet for the heat sink that came with it was very insistant that the thermal paste be spread evenly and carefully across the surface of the chip. If you got the cooler pre-set with thermal paste, it could have been unevenly spread.