Q9300 temperatures too high?

[Guest]

Hello.

My Q9300 is running on 65'C idle, while load temp goes up to ~80'C. I'm using the factory default heatsink and fan. Now, I've come to understand that such temperatures are really high for it, but it's been running like this for at least a year now.

Should I leave it like that? If not, what do you suggest?

Thank you very much.

 

[13thmonkey]

Are the push pins fully secured, is there any wobble in any of them at all, are the barbs through on the far side of the mobo (expect to bend the mobo a little when doing this). It is a very common problem with the symptoms you are showing. I assume you have used thermal paste, or at least the stuff that came with the stock cooler and you didn't remove the patch that was pre-applied.

 

[sportsfanboy]

Easy thing to do is open the case and touch the heatsink while your registering 80c. If the heatsink is hot to the touch then it is installed correctly and is most likely an airflow or fan issue. If it's registering 80c and the heatsink is cool to the touch you know it isn't installed correctly and you can verify this by putting some light pressure on the heatsink and see if the temps improve.

What are you using to load the cores and what program to measure temps?

 

[Guest]

For the stress test I use Prime95 and to measure the temperatures SpeedFan and HWMonitor. It seems like the heatsink is, in fact, not placed correctly, as I was able to touch it while CPU temperatures were at 85'C. Whether thermal paste was used, I can't be sure. I got this rig years ago and it was already set-up.

Given all that, what is it I should do?

 

[13thmonkey]

re-insert the pushpins, assume for now that it has paste, if that does not work then look for paste, removing it now will require new paste which I assume you haven't got.

 

[sportsfanboy]

How's your airflow and whats the room temperature roughly? It's pretty common for your chip to run in the 70's with stock cooling, maybe higher with bad air flow and warm to hot ambient temps. Did you touch the heatsink while it was prime95 to 85c? The heatsink should have been at least warm to the touch if not hot.

On a side note the pc and the heatsink does look dusty maybe shoot some air at the fan to clean it out, see if that helps.

 

[suteck]

Factory specs -
V core (V) 0.85 - 1.3625
Minimum/Maximum operating temperature (°C) 5 - 71.4
Minimum/Maximum power dissipation (W) 12 (TDP in extended HALT state) / 132.48
Thermal Design Power (W) 95

So yeah, push the heatsink back in place without removing it so the paste stays in place and ass-u-me all you want. If it were me though I would spend the $5 on paste and remove, clean, (with alcohol), repaste and reseat.

And you might want to clean that puppy. Great pics - you can see EVERYTHING

 

[13thmonkey]

realistically to have a good chance of reseating pushpins you'll need to have the mobo out.

Also the cabling is nice from the point of view of its all braided, but it does appear to be hampering incoming airflow, can you tidy it up so that you have better flow passages from front to back?

 

[Guest]

I want to thank everyone for their help.

After some thinking I decided that buying a new heatsink+fan would be the best choice as my GPU was also running a bit high. Got the case cleaned, tidied up the cables and reapplied thermal paste before installing the new gear. Needless to say, temperatures are A LOT better now for both units.

Thanks again,
neeTHREE.