• There seems to be an uptick in Political comments in recent months. Those of us who are long time members of the site know that Political and Religious content has been banned for years. Nothing has changed. Please leave all political and religious comments out of the forums.

    If you recently joined the forums you were not presented with this restriction in the terms of service. This was due to a conversion error when we went from vBulletin to Xenforo. We have updated our terms of service to reflect these corrections.

    Please note any post refering to a politician will be considered political even if it is intended to be humor. Our experience is these topics have a way of dividing the forums and causing deep resentment among members. It is a poison to the community. We appreciate compliance with the rules.

    The Staff of SOH

  • Server side Maintenance is done. We still have an update to the forum software to run but that one will have to wait for a better time.

1-year tear down and cleaning

O

OBIO

Retired SOH Admin
Today, I decided it was time to take my system down to the basement and tear it apart, give it a thorough cleaning and rebuild. And boy was that decision a good one. When I built the system this time last year, I had never seen the new style heat sink retainers....and did not set them right. I found that the heat sink and cooling fan were only being held in place by 1 pin...the other three had come lose. It's a small wonder I did not fry my CPU! The heat sink and CPU surface were cleaned of the old thermal paste, new thermal paste applied and all four pins fully and securely anchored into place....now the heat sink and fan are rock solid on top of the CPU...not lose and wobbly like it was when I built the system. And this time around, I installed the back plate (forgot to put it in when I built the system), installed the USB 3.0 connectors and will hook the 1Tb SATA drive to the 6gig SATA controller instead of one of the 3gig connectors.

I have the system about halfway back together...taking a break for some supper and some net time via the trusty old laptop. Can't wait to see what the system is like once it is fully back together and running cooler.

OBIO
 
My CPU temps have dropped after putting the heat sink and cooling fan on properly. Prior to the tear down and reconstruction, idle temps for my 4 core CPU ranged from 45C to 55C. Now they range from 32C to 40C. I fired up the Heaven DX11 Benchmark utility thingie and let it run through twice....and max temp hit 52C....previously I was seeing temps in the 70C area when under load. The time and effort I spent today has definitely paid off.

OBIO
 
When I finish collecting all the new equipment, I'll start in on the rebuild myself. I didn't build this rig originally, I ordered from IBuy Power and they did an excellent job, but I want to do the rebuild myself. I built all but one of my previous rigs and it's a truly satisfying experience.

I'm glad you fixed your heatsink problem, Tim. A clean machine is a happy machine.

Bob
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top