Super Low CPU temps, also 3 CD drives 400watt PSU?

[notsonoobPCguy]

I recently (a couple months ago) put together my own gaming rig. I love the thing and it will run any game i throw at it. About a month ago i heard this loud PING sound and eventually figured out that a blade from my stock CPU cooler fell off. I bought a cheap but some what nice Rosewill (i think thats how its spelled) one for 15 bucks. Its only half copper, and has a 92mm orange fan. My temps dropped a lot. I heard that the Phenom II Dual Cores are low heat CPUs, but i had no idea that it would idle at 17C :0 Maxed out it will go up to 30C, and even that is pretty cold. Is there away to get a CPU too cold?

ALSO I was given 3 CD/DVD drives. They all work, two of them are IDE and one is SATA. I only have a 400watt PSU would it be safe if i used all 3 at the same time? I might have to do some intense disk burning soooooooo. Yarp. Thanks for reading.


Heres the setup: Phenom II 550 OCed @ 3.5ghz, ATi 5770 1gb at 900 core and 1300RAM OCed btw, 3gigs of G.Skill DDR3 at 1333, a WD 250gb 7200RPM boot and steam games drive and a 1tb 5400 WD green for everything else, and all those CD drives.

 

[capt_taco]

1. No, you cannot really get a CPU "too cold." Serious overclockers will use liquid nitrogen in exhibitions, and dry ice other times. I suppose you could mess up a CPU if you got it so cold that the metal itself got physically cracked or bent out of shape, but we'd be talking hundreds of degrees below freezing. With air cooling, you cannot get it too cold.

2. From what I understand, a DVD burner consumes about 25W at peak use. Normally, I'd say the extra drives are not a big deal, but with a 5770 on a 400W power supply, you're already pushing it. Considering that most PSUs start to get jumpy at 75-80% of max load, you do not have a whole lot of room to work with.

2A. BUT -- I doubt you will be using all three DVD drives at the same time you're doing intense gaming, right? As long as you're not doing something like that, the 5770 is not going to be drawing anywhere near its max wattage, so you should be OK.

In other words, I can see a way that you COULD overload the PSU with that setup. But if you use a little common sense, you probably won't.

 

[notsonoobPCguy]

Thanks for responding so quickly, there is no way i will be burning DVDs or CDs while gaming, but 25watts is more then i thought they used D: Also i know this is somewhat offtopic but im having trouble registering my email, whats up?

 

[notsonoobPCguy]

Sorry i mean activating my email with Tom's Hardware. I did google and had no luck D:

 

[notsonoobPCguy]

Ah I just got the email and activated my account. By the way, how did i do, i spent around 550 on my rig. Did i make the right choices for parts? Im annoyed that i didn't get 4 gigs of ram but thats not a big deal.

 

[capt_taco]

For that price, it's a pretty decent setup, with the one major mistake being that for like ... $5 more than your CPU cost, you could've gotten a Phenom II triple-core or an Athlon II quad-core. It actually may still be worth looking into that -- spending the $90 or so to get a quad-core and selling your current CPU to make up some of the cost.

Also, at 7200rpm, the Samsung Spinpoint is the hard drive people rave about, and ir tends to cost about the same as the one you have. But I honestly wouldn't worry about that. Barring any exceptionally bad luck, you should be fine.

 

[notsonoobPCguy]

Yea, i was thinking about a Phenom II triple, but at that time the dual was much less. But im not a huge multi-tasker and the 550 has been known for awesome performance in games, it gets pretty close to the triple. The L3 cache is what sold it for me. I was thinking about picking up a 2gb stick of ram by Corsair for my bday, that would bump me up to 5gigs, can my PSU still handle it?