Alright well I currently have my PC overclocked to 3.25Ghz, a 22% overclock from stock. During normal usage I see no evidence of system instability. During Prime95 one of the worker threads will crash after 15 minutes and my cores will go between 74-77C. I have an Arctic Freezer Pro 7, using AS5 thermal paste. The rest of my specs are in my sig. I took my PC apart, reseated my Heatsink, cleaned the old AS5 and put in a new bit of Arctic Silver 5. Then I removed the dust filters from my case fans and changed one of the intakes to an exhaust, no effect. I have this case: Newegg.com - NZXT LEXA BlackLine Black Steel / Plastic ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Computer Cases

I have three of these 120mm fans: Newegg.com - SILVERSTONE FM121 120mm Case Fan - Case Fans, one in the front pointed at the HDD's, (intake), one on the side panel (intake), and one on the back (exhaust). I have two 80mm on the top (exhaust) and the bottom (intake) case fans, just some crappy Antec LED's: Newegg.com - Antec LED80XFAN 80mm Blue LED Case Fan - Case Fans

My question is A. Why the hell are my temps under load so hot? B. Should I be concerned my system is not "prime stable" but it is stable in general?

My theories are down to wiring blocking airflow, the Arctic Freezer Pro 7 sucking ***, or because my PC is elevated closer to the top of my room the hot air doesn't really have anywhere to rise.

Any ideas? I ordered some of these 80mm case fans to replace the Antecs: Newegg.com - VANTEC TD8038H 80mm Case Fan - Case Fans

If that doesn't do it, I'm going to rewire my PC very neatly and upgrade my Heatsink. Any input is appreciated.

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I have no knowledge whatsoever on prime95, so the only suggestions I can make really are:-

1) Drop the OC amount or don't OC at all and run the program and see if it still gets so hot.

2) Try the tests as advised by wikepedia Prime95 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

if your PC passes those then there's a good chance it's stable enough at least for most programs.

I have a feeling that most CPUs would get pretty hot running prime95 as it's a stress test on the CPU mainly... I think mine would probably blow up running that for 10 hours (as recommended)

Good luck with it LS... I don't go for overclocking now personally, that's when I used to get my CRC errors and found my RAM went kaput.

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Yeah, I'm leaning towards the HSF or wiring at this point. I've looked into the Tuniq Tower, that looks like the best HSF newegg has to offer. Crysis was crashing at 3.25Ghz so I lowered it to 3.00Ghz, and it still crashed. I updated my GPU driver and the problem went away. I know 100% it's stable at 3.0, so I think I will leave it here until I figure out what is causing the heat issues. My Vantec Tornado 80mm fans are coming this week. If I still get high temps at load I'm going to rewire everything exceptionally neat.

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In case anyone cared, I redid the wiring and no effect. It's not perfect, but I can visibly see my ram (no small feat with this case) and the wiring is definitely not clogging airflow to the Northbridge to the point of sending my cores to the 70's. I searched like a madman for heatsinks, and I came up with this thing: Newegg.com - XIGMATEK HDT-S963 92mm Rifle CPU Cooler - CPU Fans & Heatsinks

Not as well known as some HSF's, but it's cheap and got killer reviews on frostytech. My top choice I could not fine anywhere in the US, the IceAge 120 by 3rsystems. This one ranked in the top ten according to Frostytech and only costs $25, so why not? I also ordered some OCZ Freeze in case the AS5 I got is defective or something.

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All I can really say LS is that you are certainly dedicated to it... I would have given up on it ages ago and left it at stock settings, LOL

I hope you get it working as you want it to after all the time, money and effort you've put into it. Keep us updated as to how it's going... I care

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I'm almost there Paddy, I just want a stable 3.5Ghz which I know I can get if the heat doesn't sabotage me. The 3.25 would be perfectly stable if it wasn't for the core temps in excess of 75C. If this doesn't work, well it may just be where my PC is seated (above me) that is causing the hot air to not rise enough to cool my case. I'm about through though lol.

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Okay well the Xigmatek cooler seems to have got it. An hour at 3.25 on Prime and TCase never broke 60C and the cores were an average of 63-68C (never breaking 69C) with no errors running Prime95 Small FFT's.

I also got rid of the AS5 for some OCZ Freeze, not sure if that's helping, I think mainly it's the better design of the Xigmatek cooler.

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cool - glad you got it sorted man, it would've bugged me too much to bother I suspect

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Yeah it drove me nuts man, but I didn't want to be limited on overclocking by a HSF lol. I learned a valuable lesson the hard way, a good Heatsink fan is extremely important! To anyone reading this, do your research before settling on any HSF!

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Alright well, Iono I'm at a loss here. Last night I tried to take it up to 3.5 with no success. So I went back to 3.25Ghz and decided to stress test for the hell of it. Stress testing exposed issues before after trying to reach a higher clock speed and returning to previous settings I thought were "stable." So I ran Prime95 after failing to reach 3.5Ghz and returning to 3.25Ghz. My PC rebooted after about 20 minutes. So it wasn't stable at 3.25... again. Tcase was at 63C with the cores about 67C-71C. 70C is the magic number with my PC, when the cores are below that the stress test results are fine.

I screamed curses very loud and beat the crap out of my PC desk.

So anyhoo, I lowered the clock speed back to 3.00. On one hand overclocking from 3.00 to 3.25 is pointless, I won't notice any performance gain except for video encoding any maybe 3D rendering, which I don't do. On the other hand I have spent so much time and energy researching heat issues and performing maintainence that I am pissed off I am only overclocking at about 12%. Getting to 3.0 stable only requires I adjust my northbridge voltage by .025. That's it. My PC idles at 32C and gets to 53C under load like this, with the cores going from 55C-59C. It runs great, stress testing confirmed that the temps are not going to be an issue, maybe I've just been my own worst enemy.

So for now, I think I'm done with massive overclocking. It's too stressful and aggravating.

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