Better temps for R5 3600

[MarvintheParrot]

Hi! Recently, I discovered that my Ryzen 5 3600 was running really hot while idle. Around 40C to 60C. I am using an AIO, the Asus ROG STRIX LC240. I have 11 fans in the case, with the AIO using a push-pull exhaust configuration. Even when I have my fans on full speed, my cpu is hitting a low of 35C. I even checked the load on the cpu, it’s around 2-4% when the temps are 50+

 

Is there anything I can do to lower the temps? Here is the extra info about the computer, load temps, etc:

 

Ryzen 5 3600

Asus LC240

Asus B550-A Gaming

16GB Crucial RAM (3600Mhz)

256GB M.2 NVMe Inland SSD

Seagate 7.2k 2TB HDD

3060 ti FE (vertical GPU, heat sink is touching the AIO tubes)

O11 MINI (not bad airflow, I think)

650W Seasonic SGX

 

Idle temps:

40-65C

 

Load temps:

70-85C

 

The fans are Corsair QL120 (9) and 2 NZXT case fans from another build.

 

I just want to know if there is any way to lower the temps without spending a ton of money. Thanks for any help or suggestions!!

[Yoyohoneywasp]

Have you tried other fan configurations? and also what kind of environment do you live in, in terms of humidity? And placement on where it physically is in the room also can play a factor. 

[Bombastinator]

The 40 doesn’t seem bad to me though the 60 is hot.  Neither are dangerous though.  The  real question is how hot does the machine get under load.  There seem to be three break points that different people consider too hot: 75, 85, and 95c. 75 is the oldest school.  It’s not unusual for a ryzen chip to run in the low 80’s under heavy load though and a lot of people have come to the conclusion that this is OK, so under 85 is often considered not a big deal with ryzen.  There are still others who say that 95c is the point one should worry at because even at 95c a cpu will last many years.  Much longer than the rest of the machine.  Fans and PSUs and keyboards and things will still fail before the cpu does.  A chip that idles at 60c though might well go beyond even 95c under heavy load though.

 

11 fans is a whole heckuva lot of fans.  Machines used to get away with 1.  Many do it today with 3 or less.  The airflow matters more than number of fans.  More isn’t necessarily better. With 11 I suspect some are merely fighting each other. 
 

So I think a few things might be looked at:

 

1. look at your fan layout.  You may actually be causing problems rather than solving them with all those fans

 

2. is your cpu mount good?  If the paste job on a cpu->cooler isn’t working well it doesn’t matter how much cooling the rest of the box has

 

3. Is your AIO functioning correctly?  One of the difficulties of AIOs is because they have moving parts they are capable of just breaking.  If the pump on an AIO fails for example, it doesn’t work at all.  One quicko trick to check for this is feel the hoses coming out of the cpu.  If one is cool to the touch but the other is hot to the touch there may be a problem.

 

4. (Which should arguably be #1) run a stress test to see what your actual high temps are.  Idle doesn’t mean a whole lot.  Heavy load does though.

 

Edited June 4, 2021 by Bombastinator

[MarvintheParrot]

2 hours ago, Yoyohoneywasp said:

Have you tried other fan configurations? and also what kind of environment do you live in, in terms of humidity? And placement on where it physically is in the room also can play a factor. 

Thanks for the reply!!

 

I live in the Northeast of the US, so not super hot (although now the weather is unusually high ~70-90) I tried to have the radiator pull in air from the outside, but that actually made the temps worse…

[MarvintheParrot]

2 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

The 40 doesn’t seem bad to me though the 60 is hot.  Neither are dangerous though.  The  real question is how hot does the machine get under load.  There seem to be three break points that different people consider too hot: 75, 85, and 95c. 75 is the oldest school.  It’s not unusual for a ryzen chip to run in the low 80’s under heavy load though and a lot of people have come to the conclusion that this is OK, so under 85 is often considered not a big deal with ryzen.  There are still others who say that 95c is the point one should worry at because even at 95c a cpu will last many years.  Much longer than the rest of the machine.  Fans and PSUs and keyboards and things will still fail before the cpu does.  A chip that idles at 60c though might well go beyond even 95c under heavy load though.

 

11 fans is a whole heckuva lot of fans.  Machines used to get away with 1.  Many do it today with 3 or less.  The airflow matters more than number of fans.  More isn’t necessarily better. With 11 I suspect some are merely fighting each other. 
 

So I think a few things might be looked at:

 

1. look at your fan layout.  You may actually be causing problems rather than solving them with all those fans

 

2. is your cpu mount good?  If the paste job on a cpu->cooler isn’t working well it doesn’t matter how much cooling the rest of the box has

 

3. Is your AIO functioning correctly?  One of the difficulties of AIOs is because they have moving parts they are capable of just breaking.  If the pump on an AIO fails for example, it doesn’t work at all.  One quicko trick to check for this is feel the hoses coming out of the cpu.  If one is cool to the touch but the other is hot to the touch there may be a problem.

 

4. (Which should arguably be #1) run a stress test to see what your actual high temps are.  Idle doesn’t mean a whole lot.  Heavy load does though.

 

Wow, that’s a lot of information! Thanks!  
 

1: I’ll try to play around with the fan configuration a bit more

 

2: I think my CPU mount is fine. When I first noticed the temps, it was a few months back and I put in some noctua thermal past which fixed it for a few months.

 

3/4: Lemme run a stress test and I’ll find out

[Yoyohoneywasp]

3 minutes ago, MarvintheParrot said:

Thanks for the reply!!

 

I live in the Northeast of the US, so not super hot (although now the weather is unusually high ~70-90) I tried to have the radiator pull in air from the outside, but that actually made the temps worse…

check the fin array for the radiator, some might be restricting proper air flow 

[MarvintheParrot]

18 minutes ago, Yoyohoneywasp said:

check the fin array for the radiator, some might be restricting proper air flow 

So I just checked the fins in the rad, and under the radiator screws there are a few fins that are bent. However, I don't think I can fix them, but let me try to stress test it first.

[MarvintheParrot]

2 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

The 40 doesn’t seem bad to me though the 60 is hot.  Neither are dangerous though.  The  real question is how hot does the machine get under load.  There seem to be three break points that different people consider too hot: 75, 85, and 95c. 75 is the oldest school.  It’s not unusual for a ryzen chip to run in the low 80’s under heavy load though and a lot of people have come to the conclusion that this is OK, so under 85 is often considered not a big deal with ryzen.  There are still others who say that 95c is the point one should worry at because even at 95c a cpu will last many years.  Much longer than the rest of the machine.  Fans and PSUs and keyboards and things will still fail before the cpu does.  A chip that idles at 60c though might well go beyond even 95c under heavy load though.

 

11 fans is a whole heckuva lot of fans.  Machines used to get away with 1.  Many do it today with 3 or less.  The airflow matters more than number of fans.  More isn’t necessarily better. With 11 I suspect some are merely fighting each other. 
 

So I think a few things might be looked at:

 

1. look at your fan layout.  You may actually be causing problems rather than solving them with all those fans

 

2. is your cpu mount good?  If the paste job on a cpu->cooler isn’t working well it doesn’t matter how much cooling the rest of the box has

 

3. Is your AIO functioning correctly?  One of the difficulties of AIOs is because they have moving parts they are capable of just breaking.  If the pump on an AIO fails for example, it doesn’t work at all.  One quicko trick to check for this is feel the hoses coming out of the cpu.  If one is cool to the touch but the other is hot to the touch there may be a problem.

 

4. (Which should arguably be #1) run a stress test to see what your actual high temps are.  Idle doesn’t mean a whole lot.  Heavy load does though.

 

I just ran Cinebench, and I felt the tubes every ~30 seconds, and one of them was a little bit hotter than the other one, almost not-noticeable. However, the AIO pump is connected to the CPU fan header, and in the Asus fan controller it says that the CPU fan is at 1600-2000rpm, I dont know if this proves that the pump still works, or if I have to put the pump into the AIO_Pump header on the mobo instead.

 

 The temps were a solid 73C during the multicore test. Right now, as I am writing this on Google Chrome, the CPU is around 41C-53C. 

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, MarvintheParrot said:

So I just checked the fins in the rad, and under the radiator screws there are a few fins that are bent. However, I don't think I can fix them, but let me try to stress test it first.

The deal with fins is fins with narrow spaces between them are meant for high speed air.  Fins with large spaces between them are meant for low speed air.  Fans meant for fanless cooling (and therefore the lowest speed air) can have as much as what looks like half a centimeter between fins.  The real danger with cooling fins is if they’re crushed.  Stuff bent at the factory doesn’t count.  We’re talking damage here.  
 

side note about air conditioners which are also liquid to air heat exchangers:

Spoiler

This also applies to air conditioners which generally have not softer more narrowly spaced fins and they tend to get damaged more.  If you look at the “outside” end of an a window air conditioner and see what look like shiney spots thats damage.  Air won’t flow right in that area.  They make a thing called a radiator comb for window air conditioners which is a metal comb with carefully set spacing (need to use the right spacing for the right air conditioner) that can be run through the fins of a window air conditioner to bend the fins back correctly.

 

Edited June 4, 2021 by Bombastinator

[Bombastinator]

25 minutes ago, MarvintheParrot said:

I just ran Cinebench, and I felt the tubes every ~30 seconds, and one of them was a little bit hotter than the other one, almost not-noticeable. However, the AIO pump is connected to the CPU fan header, and in the Asus fan controller it says that the CPU fan is at 1600-2000rpm, I dont know if this proves that the pump still works, or if I have to put the pump into the AIO_Pump header on the mobo instead.

 

 The temps were a solid 73C during the multicore test. Right now, as I am writing this on Google Chrome, the CPU is around 41C-53C. 

So the pump is working.  That simplifies things.  If the pump is working the paste job is decent, and the cooler is getting air, then cooling will happen.  Liquid coolers have heat sink capacity so the thing will spend some time just heating up the water.  How long varies a lot.  I’ve heard about a half hour is common.  So run something heavy (like conebemch) for half an hour or so to make sure the water is saturated with heat.  The temp you get then is your load temp.  If you want to get super hardcore there’s a somewhat antique program called prime95 that will run any processor as hard as it can be run indefinitely.  It’s considered more of a torture test than a load test.  There’s a similar program called furmark for GPUs.  More than you really need perhaps.  Both apps will push a device harder than it will ever be run normally.

[MarvintheParrot]

14 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

The deal with fins is fins with narrow spaces between them are meant for high speed air.  Fins with large spaces between them are meant for low speed air.  Fans meant for fanless cooling (and therefore the lowest speed air) can have as much as what looks like half a centimeter between fins.  The real danger with cooling fins is if they’re crushed.  Stuff bent at the factory doesn’t count.  We’re talking damage here.  
 

side note about air conditioners which are also liquid to air heat exchangers:

  Reveal hidden contents

This also applies to air conditioners which generally have not softer more narrowly spaced fins and they tend to get damaged more.  If you look at the “outside” end of an a window air conditioner and see what look like shiney spots thats damage.  Air won’t flow right in that area.  They make a thing called a radiator comb for window air conditioners which is a metal comb with carefully set spacing (need to use the right spacing for the right air conditioner) that can be run through the fins of a window air conditioner to bend the fins back correctly.

 

 

12 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

So the pump is working.  That simplifies things.  If the pump is working the paste job is decent, and the cooler is getting air, then cooling will happen.  Liquid coolers have heat sink capacity so the thing will spend some time just heating up the water.  How long varies a lot.  I’ve heard about a half hour is common.  So run something heavy (like conebemch) for half an hour or so to make sure the water is saturated with heat.  The temp you get then is your load temp.  If you want to get super hardcore there’s a somewhat antique program called prime95 that will run any processor as hard as it can be run indefinitely.  It’s considered more of a torture test than a load test.  There’s a similar program called furmark for GPUs.  More than you really need perhaps.  Both apps will push a device harder than it will ever be run normally.

Thank you for the information. I attached some pictures of the bent/damaged fins on the radiator. Note that both pictures are under the screw holes, so they are very hard to access. When you wrote "conebemch" did you mean cinebench? If not, could you attach a link to the download, as I can not find any download for something called "conebemch"

 

[Bombastinator]

4 minutes ago, MarvintheParrot said:

 

Thank you for the information. I attached some pictures of the bent/damaged fins on the radiator. Note that both pictures are under the screw holes, so they are very hard to access. When you wrote "conebemch" did you mean cinebench? If not, could you attach a link to the download, as I can not find any download for something called "conebemch"

 

Not enough to make a difference unless that screw punctured the pipe and let the liquid drain out. 

[MarvintheParrot]

1 minute ago, Bombastinator said:

Not enough to make a difference unless that screw punctured the pipe and let the liquid drain out. 

Thank you for all the help! Once I moved the AIO header to the AIO_Pump, temps improved by around 5-7C.  

[Bombastinator]

Just now, MarvintheParrot said:

Thank you for all the help! Once I moved the AIO header to the AIO_Pump, temps improved by around 5-7C.  

Hmm.  Might not have been running the pump with sufficient speed then.  Not something I’d notice though a specific computer liquid cooler person might.  I’m not really one such.  I actually prefer air for computer cooling.  It’s not always possible though.

[Mark Kaine]

On 6/4/2021 at 6:56 PM, Bombastinator said:

The 40 doesn’t seem bad to me though the 60 is hot.

Problem with Ryzen is they'll shoot up in temps a lot momentarily, so if they're at 40 while "idle" 60 seems to be completely normal if it isnt constant, and it isnt because  OP said 40-60, so I think it's just completely normal Ryzen behaviour, besides 2-4% is not "idle". The chip will behave different with 0-1% usage…

[freeagent]

My old 3600XT used to idle down to the mid 20s with an air cooler.. a lot has to be said for ones personal environment and its ambient temperatures. Case, fans, and flow all play a part. If you use your warm case air to cool your AIO, that doesn't help. Best results come from cool air from outside of the case.

[MarvintheParrot]

9 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

Problem with Ryzen is they'll shoot up in temps a lot momentarily, so if they're at 40 while "idle" 60 seems to be completely normal if it isnt constant, and it isnt because  OP said 40-60, so I think it's just completely normal Ryzen behaviour, besides 2-4% is not "idle". The chip will behave different with 0-1% usage…

I was looking at task manager and it seems like at least 1% of my CPU load is coming from Corsair iCUE, which I would have turned off if it wasn't for my fans.

1 hour ago, freeagent said:

My old 3600XT used to idle down to the mid 20s with an air cooler.. a lot has to be said for ones personal environment and its ambient temperatures. Case, fans, and flow all play a part. If you use your warm case air to cool your AIO, that doesn't help. Best results come from cool air from outside of the case.

Interesting, I had an air cooler before I got the AIO (ARCTIC 34 Esports DUO) and the temps were AMAZING. Mid 20s to low 30s. I got the AIO for the looks, which probably wasn't the best Idea, but now the air cooler won't even fit in my new case . I also switched my radiator fans around so they now are intake fans, which lowered temps by around 5C. Also, I moved the AIO pump into the actually AIO_Pump header on my mobo(it was previously in CPU_fan) and that lowered temps by another 5C, I guess it just helped control the pump better.