Time for a PC Upgrade

[Raid]

Yeah, that's the thing, I can't find a consistent answer. I'm certainly not the only one having idle temperatures this high, but while some point to bios settings as possible reasons, this is a brand new motherboard with a brand new chipset (they were only released on tuesday) so I'm not going to find a lot of user experiences for this configuration.

[Mantis]

Even for a new chipset, 50-60 degree idle temps is really quite high. I wouldn't have thought that would be considered the norm at all.

[Raid]

Yeah, I'm not sure why the idle temperature is so high, but a stress test (constant 100% CPU usage) maxed the temperature out at 78 degrees, so I think the cooler is probably working correctly and it's something to do with the motherboard's settings. I'll investigate further, but I'm happier now that it's not something I've broken during installation.

[Raid]

A quick 10 minute blast on Doom Eternal had the temperatures up to about 70 (with very brief spikes up to 78), which is a rise of only about 10-15 degrees under load. I don't think the CPU was maxed - Doom doesn't let you put the settings up too high if your VRAM can't support them, and my card is only a 4gb one. It's a heck of a lot smoother than it was, though you'd hope so really.

I've ordered myself some thermal paste so if I do decide to take the cooler off I'm not stuck waiting. I'm going to try asking on the AMD subreddit to see if they can suggest anything.

[Raid]

Ok, so I had another look and there may have been a problem with my case fan configuration.

This probably made sense when I had a pair of closed loop water coolers, but I think all of my case fans were blowing air into the case, so that the two water coolers had plenty of cold air to draw from, as they were blowing air through the radiators and out of the case. Now that the CPU cooler is exhausting into the case, this obviously had to change. I did look at this when building it today, but I must have just got the direction wrong on one of them. I've stuck the fan that had been above the CPU cooler instead on the back panel, and changed the airflow direction so it's now exhausting. Putting the exhaust fan on the back panel now correctly draws air through the heatsink fins (the CPU cooler blows air downward towards the CPU, so the heatsink has cool air coming from two directions now).

Idle temperatures are now sitting closer to 40, CPU stress test at 68.

[Drarok]

Yeah, that sounds hot to me, but I'm idling at around 30, with max when gaming around 65:


But as you can see, I'm running a much older Intel chip, so what's hot for this might be nowt on modern AMD chips?!

[Rossell]

Hope you don't mind me plonking this here.

What's the best large internal hard drive that you would recommend? I want to have a small SSD for Windows than a big 2tb for storage. Reviews say seagate, user reviews say seagate are unreliable.

[DjchunKfunK]

Western Digital are a good bet and I've found Samsung to be good over the years.

[Rossell]

Cheers. I'm putting together a pc build together on various sites so I can go back in a few months once the gf3000 series is out and prices go down a bit. Every custom builder I look at is high on seagate but pc specialist have a 500gb Samsung SSD that looks good. I think I'll buy that initially then fit a western digital later on.

[Mantis]

I've been using Samsung Evo SSDs for years now and found them to be very reliable.

[Snowy]

If you are going for an old fashioned platter drive, Western Digital have always been my go-to.

Having said that, I have two 1Tb Samsung Evo 2 M2 drives in my current rig and they are sensational - so damned fast.

[Lee]

WD also have the best RMA service which I have used just twice in about 12 years of using there HDDs.

I bought two of these for my new pc https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07 ... UTF8&psc=1 for storage and been rock solid in performance if you want to save some money for 1TB drives

[Drarok]

I bought two of these for my new pc https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07 ... UTF8&psc=1 for storage and been rock solid in performance if you want to save some money for 1TB drives

Looks to be only about £24 cheaper than a Samsung Evo, but a lot slower. Now, relative to any SATA SSD it's still going to crush, but worth knowing.

[DjchunKfunK]

This review would suggest that it is only slightly slower on write speeds and faster on everything else.

Capable of delivering up to 5.0/4.4 GBps read/write in sequential transfers and peaking at almost 600,000/550,000 IOPS read/write, it is one of the fastest SSDs you can buy. It’s so fast, it even outperforms Samsung’s 970 EVO Plus and 970 Pro in various real-world and application testing, while being quite efficient.

https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/reviews ... ce-value/2

[Alan]

tldr: normal people won't notice a bit of a difference.