CPU cooler not working properly or reached its limit? Mugen 5

[aa55555]

I installed a brand new Scythe Mugen 5 Rev.B paired with Noctua iPPC 3000 RPM on my Ryzen 5 2600 OC 4.07 GHz 1.312v, but it does not do well as the reviews claim. Previously using Cooler Master MA410P with the same Noctua fan recorded 77c, the Scythe do only 76c, only 1c difference, both are tested in same 24c room temperature and fans are on max speed. Both coolers are applied with Noctua NT-H1 thermal paste, however in today the paste has been stored for 1.5 years after first use. Could it be the problem? as Noctua claims it can store for 2 years. I have uninstalled the cooler once and found the paste applied is evenly spreaded. What I think for this new cooler does not work properly is because its heat pipes near the baseplate are cold to touch when CPU is on load! As compared my GPU heat pipes are hot to touch even only in 70c. Can Mugen 5 users clarify about this?

 

I have no extra alcohol to clean the old paste so I posted here to get opinions before I buy it tomorrow. Thank you.

[Metallus97]

welcome to the forums! 

inst that fan hella loud on full blast?

try slower fan speeds and compare the deltas. this should open up the gap more

in general those temps seem ok but maybe a bit high for the fan on full boost 

[aa55555]

1 minute ago, Metallus97 said:

welcome to the forums! 

inst that fan hella loud on full blast?

try slower fan speeds and compare the deltas. this should open up the gap more

in general those temps seem ok

Around 46 dBA when on max speed but thats only happen when I am doing stress test.

Drop the fan speed to same speed as the stock fan 1200rpm, temperature increased to 79c, didn't do the same on Cooler Master so idk its temp on slower fan speed.

[Metallus97]

3 minutes ago, aa55555 said:

Around 46 dBA when on max speed but thats only happen when I am doing stress test.

Drop the fan speed to same speed as the stock fan 1200rpm, temperature increased to 79c, didn't do the same on Cooler Master so idk its temp on slower fan speed.

that’s ok but on the hotter side

 how is the general airflow on your case set up? do a test without side panel

[aa55555]

1 minute ago, Metallus97 said:

that’s ok but on the hotter side

 how is the general airflow on your case set up? do a test without side panel

The airflow of my case is very good as it comes with full front mesh cover, almost no difference with side panel off for both CPU and GPU temps.

[Metallus97]

1 hour ago, aa55555 said:

The airflow of my case is very good as it comes with full front mesh cover, almost no difference with side panel off for both CPU and GPU temps.

okay, a repaste never hurts but the low delta is normal with the fan at 100%

[aa55555]

12 hours ago, Metallus97 said:

okay, a repaste never hurts but the low delta is normal with the fan at 100%

Repasted with Cooler Master MasterGel Pro came with MA410P that just used not more than half a year, it does much WORSE than the 1.5 years old Noctua NT-H1, 3c increase.

So the paste is not the issue, but the heat pipes are still cold to touch, any idea?

[Bombastinator]

I notice you got two fans snuggled up next to that cooler.  Which way is each blowing?  The idea is to get air to flow over the cooling plates and out of the case.

 

my first impulse would be to remove that top fan or move it.  Perhaps merely unplug it.  Also make sure the back fan is pointing out.

[aa55555]

Just now, Bombastinator said:

I notice you got two fans snuggled up next to that cooler.  Which way is each blowing?  The idea is to get air to flow over the cooling plates and out of the case.

Exhaust. The 3 fans in front are intake.

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, aa55555 said:

Exhaust. The 3 fans in front are intake.

That fan next to the cpu cooler may not be doing you any favors.  Do numbers improve if you unplug it?

[aa55555]

1 minute ago, Bombastinator said:

That fan next to the cpu cooler may not be doing you any favors.  Do numbers improve if you unplug it?

Rear or top? But if I do the test with side panel off really doesn't make a difference.

The problem is why the Mugen 5 heat pipes near the baseplate are cold to touch when CPU on load, is it behave like this or I just got a bad cooler?

[MartinKweh]

it would be funny if you put the cooler without removing the sticker underneath lol

[Bombastinator]

4 minutes ago, aa55555 said:

Rear or top? But if I do the test with side panel off really doesn't make a difference.

The problem is why the Mugen 5 heat pipes near the baseplate are cold to touch when CPU on load, is it behave like this or I just got a bad cooler?

Top.

[aa55555]

3 minutes ago, Martin2132 said:

it would be funny if you put the cooler without removing the sticker underneath lol

Nope, I peeled it off, and I repasted 4 times, still the same.

[Bombastinator]

3 minutes ago, Martin2132 said:

it would be funny if you put the cooler without removing the sticker underneath lol

What sticker? The circular sticker in the middle that holds in the lubricant on some fan types?  This sounds like some kind of “make him pres alt+f4!  It will be funny!” Thing.

[MartinKweh]

15 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

What sticker? The circular sticker in the middle that holds in the lubricant on some fan types?  This sounds like some kind of “make him pres alt+f4!  It will be funny!” Thing.

no i mean the sticker on the part that makes contact with the CPU. ive seen many people that forgot to remove that part lol

[Bombastinator]

2 minutes ago, aa55555 said:

Nope, I peeled it off, and I repasted 4 times, still the same.

I doubt it’s a connection issue.  Think of what you have as an air heat exchanger.  You’re taking cold air and warming it by passing it over the fins.  After it’s warm you want to get rid of it and bring in new cool air to heat

[aa55555]

3 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

I doubt it’s a connection issue.  Think of what you have as an air heat exchanger.  You’re taking cold air and warming it by passing it over the fins.  After it’s warm you want to get rid of it and bring in new cool air to heat

But when I disassemble the cooler I found the thermal paste was evenly spread. I doubt I am having bad cooler that their heat pipes are not connecting the baseplate properly.

However it is still not as bad as it will goes up to 100c, so I really need Mugen 5 users to clarify is the heat pipes behave normally or not.

[Bombastinator]

25 minutes ago, aa55555 said:

But when I disassemble the cooler I found the thermal paste was evenly spread. I doubt I am having bad cooler that their heat pipes are not connecting the baseplate properly.

However it is still not as bad as it will goes up to 100c, so I really need Mugen 5 users to clarify is the heat pipes behave normally or not.

Not a Mugen user myself.  I was of the older school of “count the heat pipes and that’s how good the cooler is” (no longer true) so I bought an old viper X.  I suspect it’s behaving fine.

Speaking generally about how air coolers work:

 

 The Mugen is a 6 pipe narrow fin space large fin area cooler.  It’s going to want some fairly high pressure fast air going over it’s fins.  The air needs to move across the entire fin stack inside and out.

 

Heat pipes are sort of little water coolers.  They’re filled with very low pressure water that therefore has a really low boiling point, and some sort of surface area increaser around the edges of the pipe.  This can be sinistered beads, a very fine mesh screen, or in the case of low quality stuff merely grooves in the pipe sides.  They move really surprisingly large amounts of heat with simple convection.  If the pipes are cold they’re working. They’re convecting heat from your fingers.  The thermal connection between the CPU and the plate is metal to metal conduction via pressure and thermal paste.  Mostly pressure.  The thermal connection between the pipes and the plate is the same except there is more pressure and no paste.  If the pipes are loose there might be a problem, but if they’re tight, and especially if they’re soldered, there’s no real way for it to be a problem.

[aa55555]

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

Not a Mugen user myself.  I was of the older school of “count the heat pipes and that’s how good the cooler is” (no longer true) so I bought an old viper X.  I suspect it’s behaving fine.

Speaking generally about how air coolers work:

 

 The Mugen is a 6 pipe narrow fin space large fin area cooler.  It’s going to want some fairly high pressure fast air going over it’s fins.  The air needs to move across the entire fin stack inside and out.

 

Heat pipes are sort of little water coolers.  They’re filled with very low pressure water that therefore has a really low boiling point, and some sort of surface area increaser around the edges of the pipe.  This can be sinistered beads, a very fine mesh screen, or in the case of low quality stuff merely grooves in the pipe sides.  They move really surprisingly large amounts of heat with simple convection.  If the pipes are cold they’re working. They’re convecting heat from your fingers.  The thermal connection between the CPU and the plate is metal to metal conduction via pressure and thermal paste.  Mostly pressure.  The thermal connection between the pipes and the plate is the same except there is more pressure and no paste.  If the pipes are loose there might be a problem, but if they’re tight, and especially if they’re soldered, there’s no real way for it to be a problem.

But this doesn't explain why my GPU heat pipes are hot to touch when on load compared to Mugen's one. The location that I touch on the heat pipes is near to the CPU before the aluminium fins, not the top of the cooler.

[LogicalDrm]

5 hours ago, aa55555 said:

But this doesn't explain why my GPU heat pipes are hot to touch when on load compared to Mugen's one. The location that I touch on the heat pipes is near to the CPU before the aluminium fins, not the top of the cooler.

Your hand is extremely inaccurate way of telling temps. Try with temp probe. Besides that, GPU produces much more heat than the CPU.

[Bombastinator]

6 hours ago, aa55555 said:

But this doesn't explain why my GPU heat pipes are hot to touch when on load compared to Mugen's one. The location that I touch on the heat pipes is near to the CPU before the aluminium fins, not the top of the cooler.

It does mean the Mugen isn’t working very hard.  It doesn’t mean it’s not working though.  
 

The Mugen has a much lower wattage chip to cool while having a much higher tdp than your gpu cooler.  That you are having trouble  cooling your CPU says there is a problem but I don’t think the finger heat test does.  You are getting very little cooling change between between a low speed fan and a high speed fan, and very little cooling change between different paste types.
 

There might for example be a flatness issue on either the part of the Mugen plate or the CPU heat spreader.  This could mean they might need to be lapped (an annoying, sometimes risky, and warranty voiding process)  generally one sees uneven past distribution upon opening the cooler/cpu connection when this happens because the low areas will have lots of paste where the high areas will have almost no paste.

 

Another possibility is there isn’t enough pressure holding the CPU cooler to the CPU.  Paste is just there to fill in microscopically small unevennesses between the plates.  It’s a better heat conductor than air, but not a great heat conductor in general.

The CPU makes only 65w before overclock.  techspot did some overclocking of the ryzen 2600 and found that even a 4.2ghz overclock barely doubled power consumption making an even overclocked 2600 a less than 150w tdp chip.

 

Yet another possibility is that the thermal conduction between the CPU chiplets and the heat spreader is limited.  That would mean that the CPU can only transfer so much heat to the cooler to begin with.  You could have a good thermal connection between the cooler and the CPU spreader, but still only get so much cooling because that’s all your CPU can do.  Still not the fault of the cooler.

 

That you are even getting a 0.1 ghz difference from a tech spot best overclock implies that your overclock is likely about as high as can be done with that CPU.  It can only transfer so much of the heat it makes.  A massive overkill cooler like a Mugen means it is capable of transferring a lot of heat, but if there is only so much heat to transfer there’s only so much it can do.  People use big coolers like the Mugen on low tdp chips like the the 2600 so they can get lower fan speed and less noise while transferring all the heat that can be transferred, not so they can cool the chip more.  There is a limit to how much heat that can be transferred out of the CPU.

 

This is why people are saying turn down your fans.  You hit diminishing returns for heat transfer well before you hit maximum fan speed.

[aa55555]

38 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

It does mean the Mugen isn’t working very hard.  It doesn’t mean it’s not working though.  
 

The Mugen has a much lower wattage chip to cool while having a much higher tdp than your gpu cooler.  That you are having trouble  cooling your CPU says there is a problem but I don’t think the finger heat test does.  You are getting very little cooling change between between a low speed fan and a high speed fan, and very little cooling change between different paste types.
 

There might for example be a flatness issue on either the part of the Mugen plate or the CPU heat spreader.  This could mean they might need to be lapped (an annoying, sometimes risky, and warranty voiding process)  generally one sees uneven past distribution upon opening the cooler/cpu connection when this happens because the low areas will have lots of paste where the high areas will have almost no paste.

 

Another possibility is there isn’t enough pressure holding the CPU cooler to the CPU.  Paste is just there to fill in microscopically small unevennesses between the plates.  It’s a better heat conductor than air, but not a great heat conductor in general.

The CPU makes only 65w before overclock.  techspot did some overclocking of the ryzen 2600 and found that even a 4.2ghz overclock barely doubled power consumption making an even overclocked 2600 a less than 150w tdp chip.

 

Yet another possibility is that the thermal conduction between the CPU chiplets and the heat spreader is limited.  That would mean that the CPU can only transfer so much heat to the cooler to begin with.  You could have a good thermal connection between the cooler and the CPU spreader, but still only get so much cooling because that’s all your CPU can do.  Still not the fault of the cooler.

 

That you are even getting a 0.1 ghz difference from a tech spot best overclock implies that your overclock is likely about as high as can be done with that CPU.  It can only transfer so much of the heat it makes.  A massive overkill cooler like a Mugen means it is capable of transferring a lot of heat, but if there is only so much heat to transfer there’s only so much it can do.  People use big coolers like the Mugen on low tdp chips like the the 2600 so they can get lower fan speed and less noise while transferring all the heat that can be transferred, not so they can cool the chip more.  There is a limit to how much heat that can be transferred out of the CPU.

 

This is why people are saying turn down your fans.  You hit diminishing returns for heat transfer well before you hit maximum fan speed.

My chip does 145w package power when running small FFTs with AVX stress test.

The Mugen (6 heatpipes, thicker body) with fan speed around 1200rpm does 79c in 24c room temp with delta of 55c, if the fan in 3000rpm it drops 3c.

The MA410P (4 heatpipes, thinner body) with max fan speed did 77c and that is only 1c more than Mugen in same max speed.

I thought the cooling performance of Mugen will be a lot higher than MA410P because of its size? but turned out only 1c difference, so this does really make me suspect if the Mugen is working 100%.

 

Thermal conduction between CPU and heat spreader could be a problem also. As the two coolers show almost identical results and the CPU is 1.5 years old.

[aa55555]

1 hour ago, LogicalDrm said:

Your hand is extremely inaccurate way of telling temps. Try with temp probe. Besides that, GPU produces much more heat than the CPU.

Actually the temp difference between the heat pipes are so big, like you are touching hot kettle vs some other surfaces in room, so there is no need to use temp probe.

 

I simulated the GPU to run in same TDP as the CPU using FPS cap in Heaven Benchmark, also did fan speed cap making the GPU to run as hot as CPU, the GPU heat pipes are still way hotter than the Mugen's one.

[Bombastinator]

7 minutes ago, aa55555 said:

My chip does 145w package power when running small FFTs with AVX stress test.

The Mugen (6 heatpipes, thicker body) with fan speed around 1200rpm does 79c in 24c room temp with delta of 55c, if the fan in 3000rpm it drops 3c.

The MA410P (4 heatpipes, thinner body) with max fan speed did 77c and that is only 1c more than Mugen in same max speed.

I thought the cooling performance of Mugen will be a lot higher than MA410P because of its size? but turned out only 1c difference, so this does really make me suspect if the Mugen is working 100%.

 

Thermal conduction between CPU and heat spreader could be a problem also. As the two coolers show almost identical results and the CPU is 1.5 years old.

The MAX cooling performance of the Mugen is higher.  A Ferrari running at 60mph is no faster than a Prius running at 60mph.  The Ferrari can do it in second gear is all.