Temperatures During Benchmarks

[arakeen]

My system has been built and bench-marked. The benchmarks show that the temperatures for the GPU( 2 x Asus Radeon HD 6950 2GB) approached 100 celsius at peak. Is this too hot?

The CPU looks like it peaked at temperatures below 60 celsius.

I love that Puget gives such detailed information on their build process and benchmarks. Two thumbs up!

Build
System Core
Motherboard Asus P8P67-M Pro REV 3.0
CPU Intel Core i5 2500K QUAD CORE 3.3GHz 95W
Ram Kingston 8GB DDR3-1333 (2x4GB)
Video Card 2 x Asus Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Storage
Hard Drive Intel X25-M 34nm Gen 2 80GB SATA II 2.5inch SSD
Western Digital Caviar Black 1.0TB SATA 6 Gb/s

CD / DVD Asus 24x DVD-RW Lightscribe SATA (black)

Case / Cooling
Case Antec P183 V3 (Gunmetal Finish)
Power Supply Antec CP-1000 1000W Power Supply
CPU Cooling Puget Hydro CL2 Liquid Cooling System 1155/6
Additional Cooling Tuniq TX-4 Thermal Compound

Software
OS Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OEM
Software: Security Microsoft Security Essentials [NO SUPPORT]
Software: Productivity OpenOffice Suite Installation [NO SUPPORT]

[PCC-William]

Modern video cards are designed to get very hot under full load, and their fans are calibrated accordingly. The fans slowly increase in speed to deal with heat as a card's temperature increases, until they hit about 80-95C (depending on the specific card) where the fan will finally ramp up high enough to keep the temps from going any higher. That helps avoid there being more noise than is necessary at lower heat levels, but can make for rather scary-looking temps under full load. It is also worth noting that the load we put the system under - all CPU cores at maximum (via Prime95) + all GPUs at full (via FurMark) - is a heavier workload than any normal program or game will be capable of. The only thing I've seen similar in real-world use is if someone has Folding@Home running on both the CPU and GPU in their system.

[arakeen]

Here are the thermals. Comments?

[PCC-William]

That looks about right - most of the system very cool, but the mosfets around the CPU putting off some heat along with the area where the video cards are venting out. The upper video card runs a bit hotter than the lower as well, since it is the main card and works a bit harder plus it contends with some added heat that rises from the lower card. Nothing off the chart, though, and nothing really even into the upper red / white area.

[arakeen]

UPS delivered my system last night. Everything seems to be working fine. Thanks Puget. I will write a review in a couple weeks and put it in the appropriate forum.

I do have one question related to temperatures. Speedfan and CPUID's PC Wizard are both reporting my CPU(CPUTIN) to be operating at 68-78c at idle, while all four cores are reporting ~31c. Is that even possible from a thermal standpoint? Is this an anomaly with the Sandy Bridge board sensor, a software issue, or something I should be concerned about?

CPUTIN : 77 °C
AUXTIN : 54.5 °C
Core 1 : 34 °C
Core 2 : 29 °C
....

[PCC-Jon]

That's likely an offset issue. Temperature reporting is less straightforward than you'd expect. Take a look at http://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/200...-temperatures/ for more info (specifically the second half).

[arakeen]

Jon,

Thanks for the article link. Great info. I figured that the readings seemed a little wonky for the CPU considering the cores were so much lower.

What about GPU readings? My GPU is showing 95c+ *1 while playing some games e.g., MMO Rift at max resolution with all the bells and whistles. Even when I maxed all the case fans and my GPU can still get up to 92. Should I be concerned? Looking at the case, motherboard, and other parts of my configuration I don't see that I have any place to easily add fans.

Does Puget have a recommended program to monitor CPU and GPU temperatures?

*1 As reported by 3 different programs GPU-Z, PC-Wizard, and MSI-Afterburner.

[PCC-Jon]

Nope, that's fine arakeen -- see your first post above and William's reply for an explanation!

We recommend CoreTemp for CPU temperature reading, and GPU-Z for video card temperature reading. GPU temperatures are done much more straightfoward, and so you shouldn't see much variation in reporting from program to program.

[PCC-William]

There are programs out there which will let you manually set the video card fan speed - if you wanted it to scale up to full speed at a lower temperature, for example. However, I don't recommend using those: graphics cards are designed to handle those sorts of temperatures, and I feel that sticking with the manufacturer's settings for fan speed is safest.