Cooling/testing questions

[angryangy]

it makes it look as though the fan is on the side of the block rather than the top

Of course it is, how else would you fit such a large fan in there? The heatpipes need to be long enough for the evaporative fluid to condense at the end and return to the heat source. The fan blows the hot air towards the back of the case, where it is exhausted; you may have a fan at the front that blows fresh air in. Larger fans move more air per revolution and thus run quieter at lower RPM. It's a much improved situation.

With prime95, you'll get a pretty good idea of stability after about 5-10 minutes. People run it overnight because less critical bugs can still turn up. I think it's also worth running stuff like SuperPi or just a game benchmark, because you can't always take it for granted that increasing the clock speed makes the computer more powerful. There are often a few more subtleties to it.

 

[MasterBlaster76]

So, taking into account that I only have a stock Intel cooler right now, what sort of temperatures should I be getting for idle and load?

Thanks, Angry. I'm a relative novice at this sort of thing - I only removed my own heatsink for the first time yesterday; before that, I'd only removed them from systems on my course where it didn't matter because they were ancient machines anyway and most importantly, not mine.

However, now I've done it, I feel that the only two upgrades I'll have any discomfort with are changing motherboard and PSU. Ram, I can do. Heatsink, I can do (and changing the CPU is easy after that), DVD/HDD, I can do and GPU I can do, so that just leaves the PSU/Mobo.

Have you an answer to my question at all?