Dan at Dan's Data did a comparison of different types of thermal paste several years ago. He also used toothpaste & Vegemite.
And the best thermal compound- Toothpaste. Even the Vegemite did better than several of the well known thermal compounds.

The advantage of good thermal paste over toothpaste & Vegemite is that it won't dry out (as fast).

That's why I used Vaseline - it is NOT water-based, and it doesn't dry out.
As I said in my original post near the beginning of this thread, I have used it for my SETI crunchers for years with no troubles.

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-[ snip ]-
Even without thermal compound, there is a reasonable amount of heat transfer, it's just not as good as using thermal compound (in the appropriate very small doses). The fact that your CPU got so hot when you first booted up indicates the heatsink wasn't attached properly.

Greetings Grant,

There is that possibility, I grant you that. But, when installing the pump/heat sink the third time I did it exactly the same way as the first installation and when doing the re-installation with Vaseline. Perhaps I used too much Vaseline, I don't know. All I know for sure is when I put the Arctic Silver 5 on the heat sink and reinstalled it, the temps were back to normal.

As painstaking as it is to install that pump/heat sink, I won't be doing it again with Vaseline just to test the theory that I may have installed it wrong. Too much care has to be taken to be sure the pump is installed correctly. That is why I say I don't think I installed it wrong even though the possibility exists.

Another possibility just came to mind. I researched the i7 860 CPU and found it to be notorious at running very hot, hence my use of a liquid cooling system. I could not run BOINC with the stock fan. Perhaps the Vaseline is not up to snuff when it comes to this particular CPU. If I were to run without the aide of TThrottle, running on 8 cores would fry the CPU, even with the liquid cooler. That is why I got this new case which comes with 6 externally accessible filters over intake fans.

Have a great weekend! :)

Keep on BOINCing...! :)

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CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

If I were to run without the aide of TThrottle, running on 8 cores would fry the CPU, even with the liquid cooler.

Which to me says something's not right with the installation. Even with the stock cooler, those CPUs are generally capable of 3+GHz, and up to 4GHz with overvoltage when overclocking (although certainly not running Seti at the time).
At stock clock speeds, with the stock cooler, with ambient temperatures around 25°c I'd expect it to run Seti on all cores with no problems at all. With a liquid cooling system and at stock speeds, I'd expect it to run full out even with ambient temperatures up around 40°c

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Grant
Darwin NT

If I were to run without the aide of TThrottle, running on 8 cores would fry the CPU, even with the liquid cooler.

Which to me says something's not right with the installation.

It sounds like something is wrong to me, too.

From what has been said so-far, my first inclination is to suspect the heatsink installation on the CPU. I'm wondering if the heatsink isn't "floating" on heatsink compound instead touching the CPU.

What makes me think that is that with no thermal grease at all if the CPU were clean and the heatsink were clean and they were touching each-other, he shouldn't have-had the Vaseline experience he had --- even if Vaseline were a bad idea (and I have never tried that, so I have no thoughts about it at all).

It has been a long time ago, but I had a situation like that once where, although the heatsink was mounted securely to the motherboard, the heatsink nevertheless was not in direct contact with the CPU. The socket was stopping it. The cure was to turn the heatsink 90 degrees. And it was deceptive because it "looked" like it was touching and it "felt" like the heatsink was snug, because it was snug, but not against the CPU.

The surprise was that it even could be mounted 90 degrees out (the bracket allowed that).

The only other excuse I can think-of for that would be something like over-volting the processor either intentionally (in an over-zealous overclock), or by accident in the BIOS, or as the result of a bad voltage regulator on the motherboard.

Whatever it is, something sounds very not right.

-[ snip ]-
Even without thermal compound, there is a reasonable amount of heat transfer, it's just not as good as using thermal compound (in the appropriate very small doses). The fact that your CPU got so hot when you first booted up indicates the heatsink wasn't attached properly.

Greetings Grant,

There is that possibility, I grant you that. But, when installing the pump/heat sink the third time I did it exactly the same way as the first installation and when doing the re-installation with Vaseline. Perhaps I used too much Vaseline, I don't know. All I know for sure is when I put the Arctic Silver 5 on the heat sink and reinstalled it, the temps were back to normal.

As painstaking as it is to install that pump/heat sink, I won't be doing it again with Vaseline just to test the theory that I may have installed it wrong. Too much care has to be taken to be sure the pump is installed correctly. That is why I say I don't think I installed it wrong even though the possibility exists.

Another possibility just came to mind. I researched the i7 860 CPU and found it to be notorious at running very hot, hence my use of a liquid cooling system. I could not run BOINC with the stock fan. Perhaps the Vaseline is not up to snuff when it comes to this particular CPU. If I were to run without the aide of TThrottle, running on 8 cores would fry the CPU, even with the liquid cooler. That is why I got this new case which comes with 6 externally accessible filters over intake fans.

Have a great weekend! :)

Keep on BOINCing...! :)

The stock cooler for the i7-860 is not sufficient when the ambient temp gets over 75ºF. On my old HTPC went with a Venomous X-RT. These days it runs perfectly happy with the high ambient temps the system seems sitting up in my loft. Where it get much hotter than the rest of my condo.
I don't have a thermostat up there at the moment. However the 2.5" SATA drive in that system is reading 42ºC while the 2.5" SATA drive in a system on the main level is reading 27ºC. With that high internal case temp and running 8 CPU tasks. The cores of the 860 are only running 50ºC & the CPU Tcase is 41ºC.

With petroleum jelly having a melting point of 37ºC & being flammable I would personally not use it on any electronics I valued.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

Greetings guys,

Ok, you guys have me thinking about this now...

First, I never over clock a PC and don't go messing with the BIOS except on an initial build.

I have been suspicious of this MoBo for some time now. I have been having intermittent problems with my USB. It drops out and then comes back to life. Since I had to replace my PSU just recently, I'm wondering if the old one may have been having an adverse affect on the MoBo before it died.

I never thought about Vaseline being flammable. I definitely will not be using it now in place of thermal paste.

Gotta go, be back in a few hours.

Keep on BOINCing...! :)

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CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr - L L & P _\\//
Winders 11 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

...
With petroleum jelly having a melting point of 37ºC & being flammable I would personally not use it on any electronics I valued.

A reference book from the 1950's I have indicates a melting point range of 38ºC to 45ºC for "Vaseline" brand petroleum jelly. IMO that's possibly a very good feature, it will spread out and fill gaps very quickly. If applied in the "grain of rice" quantity which ought to be plenty to fill the gaps if the CPU heat spreader and the base of the heatsink are reasonably smooth and flat, there would be so little exposed to air around the periphery of the joint that flammability is not an issue.

The ultimate heat sink would be made of pure single crystal diamond, and optical methods could be used to be sure no air bubbles were trapped in the joint. For now, we have to do the best we can with opaque heat sinks. I wonder if ultrasound imaging could be used to check for bubbles? Or maybe it might make sense to assemble heat sinks to CPUs in a vacuum chamber...

                                                                   Joe

Just a side note for folks who may have trouble finding thermal compounds available locally.....
You may have some luck obtaining silicone heat sink compound from auto parts suppliers. It is used when installing or replacing certain electronic modules in cars.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

Just a side note for folks who may have trouble finding thermal compounds available locally.....
You may have some luck obtaining silicone heat sink compound from auto parts suppliers. It is used when installing or replacing certain electronic modules in cars.

Yes! My daughter's fiancee just replaced a tail light in her car, and the bulb came with a little packet of silicone grease (to protect from water infiltration)

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Just to be ABSOLUTELY clear, the recommendation of assigning one CPU core per AP task is properly accomplished by setting:

ngpus .5
ncpus 2

or

ngpus .33
ncpus 3

or does setting ncpus=1 reserve one core per AP launch independent of the ngpu setting?


(BTW, I have been using Arctic Silver for many years. Quite literally hundreds of builds, stock to massively overclocked. On the systems I have cleaned and changed, I have always observed at least a 1-2 degree Celsius temperature drop although I suppose this could be attributed to cleaning and careful and sparing application. I am currently using it on GPUs as well. My Q9650 3.0 GHz is running S@H 24/7 clocked to 4.02 Ghz with peak core temps never exceeding 155F, ave temps ~130F)

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Member of the 20 Year Club

...
or does setting ncpus=1 reserve one core per AP launch independent of the ngpu setting?
...

Yes, both the ngpus and ncpus settings are per task.

                                                                   Joe

Maybe a little off the topic, but it deals with my two 770 GPU's heat factor. I may have found that the heat generated from the two GTX 770's and one 580 GTX could be messing up the heat in my house, especially when the outside heat gets above 90. My thermostat has trouble keeping the temp inside the house below 77-78, even with the thermostat set on 75. Yesterday, just using the CPU's inside the house stayed at 75(nice), even with the temp outside at 94. Today I will switch to the CPU's only again before the outside temp goes above 90 and will report the results later.

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My thermostat has trouble keeping the temp inside the house below 77-78, even with the thermostat set on 75.

It's not the thermostat that's having a problem, it's the air conditioner itself. If more heat comes in than it can pump out, it doesn't matter how low you set the temperature, the unit just isn't capable of pumping out enough heat to get it down that low.

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Grant
Darwin NT

My thermostat has trouble keeping the temp inside the house below 77-78, even with the thermostat set on 75.

It's not the thermostat that's having a problem, it's the air conditioner itself. If more heat comes in than it can pump out, it doesn't matter how low you set the temperature, the unit just isn't capable of pumping out enough heat to get it down that low.

I have that same issue. Given I have a 30 year old central A/C & my condo is basically designed like a greenhouse. I consider anything below 80ºF before the sun goes down a win once it get over 90ºF outside.
Based on that I make sure add a sufficiently beefy cooler to my systems.
"Maybe next year I will get a new A/C." He said for the past 3 years in a row.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

Thank you for the reply. I checked with my A/C guy and he said maybe the part of duct had collapsed. He is checking it Wednesday. It is not old, only 6 years old. Was doing great until May, then with the temp often above 90 outside, it struggled in the afternoon.

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My A/C guy looked at it yesterday and said I have a partially collapsed duct.

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That should be an easy fix.

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That should be an easy fix.

Depends on how easy it is to access.
Easy to access, easy to fix. If it's like a friend's system, not so easy. They had to remove a good portion of their roof to replace the evaporator assembly when it died. They removed & replaced the roof section themselves- otherwise the roof work would have cost more than the air conditioner repair...

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Grant
Darwin NT

Yes access could be a problem and in some cases very expensive to get at that simple fix. :-O

Some will just stare you in the face while others you have to go to ridiculous lengths just to get at them.

Cheers.

Grant, Wiggo you bring up a valid point.

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