My story

Kaian · July 13, 2016

Hi everyone, sorry for the title but I don't know what I should put in to make it clearer. Hopefully this topic wasn't too bad or spammy because I don't mean to at all. I'm relatively new to all the hardware thing, although I've been playing games on my PC for almost 15 years.

It's unacceptable for such a person to not give a care to his PC after all those years, I know. But anyway I want to share this.

Before nVidia announced Pascal, I was oblivious to hardware. CPU, GPU, MOBO, RAM... I know what they are, like, CPU is the "brain", GPU is what renders graphics and the most important on my gaming build,... but no more. When I wanted a new PC, I went to the store, told them my budget and let them build one for me. That's it. So I didn't even know about the architecture, what the difference between Xeon and i3/i5/i7 is, why the hell they named everything so confusingly. And of course I didn't know or care about OC either.

However, after the Pascal hype I thought I need to know more about what I'm doing, so I watched a lot of vids, linus was one of them and he showed me a lot of cool things, especially how out of date my knowledge about hardware is. So, as my other topic stated, I tried to build a new PC myself this time, which will have various stuff I never cared about before. My main concern was "Do I really need to OC? If I don't, do I really need to get a good/expensive cooler? And do I need to get an expensive MOBO?"

So, first I looked at my current PC: i5-4570, Gigabyte H87-D3H, and MSI GTX 660 Ti. Linus and other tech youtubers said that my questions are to be answered with "temperature". OC will push my PC, and it's much safer than... 15 years ago. Air Cooling is great, but Water Cooling is in general better, and the closed kits won't leak or required serious maintenance like 15 years ago either. However, even a stock cooler would suffice if I do not OC.

How good should the temp be, then? As far as I can see, when the system is idle, ~20 Celsius degrees would be more than enough. In 100% load, in stress tests, or OC, below ~75 degrees is the safe range. If it hits 80+, it's dangerous. And all of those are words from the US/EU, where the weather is relative cool.

I'm in Vietnam, a tropical country. Normal room temp can get to 30 C easily, everyday. So now that's something to be concerned with. But my system with a stock cooler runs bloody fine for 3 years, so big deal. That's what I thought. Now for the first time ever I checked my PC temperature (playing Overwatch at High Settings, 1080p, smoothly at ~90 fps with couple of Chrome tabs + a youtube video playing)

Here is the result:

...I think this is bad, right? And I've probably doing this for months if not years. So here is what I'd like to discuss: why was my CPU able to keep up like this? Is the limit actually higher than the one techy youtubers recommended?

Also, I've seen alot (if not all) people using i7-6700k OC @4.6GHz, is it the norm? How really different does it make between OC and non OC for a regular gamer? I asked around before and the replies I got were "because why not?". It's like if I don't OC in this day and age I'm not on the "cool" side, and not really about how effectively it works.

Thank you, and sorry for a long post. Nice to meet you all.

don_svetlio · July 13, 2016

Your CPU temps are dangerously high. Anything over 80*C is bad on Intel's LGA sockets and anything over 70*C is bad on AMD's sockets

Kaian · July 13, 2016

8 minutes ago, don_svetlio said:

Your CPU temps are dangerously high. Anything over 80*C is bad on Intel's LGA sockets and anything over 70*C is bad on AMD's sockets

Yes, it was because of the dust. After seeing that I instantly shut down my PC, wait for it too cool down and clean the hell out of it. Now it's running at ~50 degrees. Should be ok for now....

NinjaJc01 · July 13, 2016

18 minutes ago, Kaian said:

Yes, it was because of the dust. After seeing that I instantly shut down my PC, wait for it too cool down and clean the hell out of it. Now it's running at ~50 degrees. Should be ok for now....

You might want watercooling, I think it does much better in hot climates.

LogicalDrm · July 14, 2016

15 hours ago, Kaian said:

Yes, it was because of the dust. After seeing that I instantly shut down my PC, wait for it too cool down and clean the hell out of it. Now it's running at ~50 degrees. Should be ok for now....

So its 50C under gaming load now? Or really low load?

Temps are fine up to that 80C mark. Between 80C and 90C runs line for dangerous. Where is personal preference. Mine is 87C. Anything over 90C is really dangerous.

Another thing to note. Most thermal tests are done with 20-25C room temp, as you said. Since your room temp will be over 30C, you can expect seeing over 10C difference between your normal temps and temp of those in colder areas (like here, summertime days outside is barely 22C ).

Kaian · July 14, 2016

14 minutes ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

So its 50C under gaming load now? Or really low load?

Temps are fine up to that 80C mark. Between 80C and 90C runs line for dangerous. Where is personal preference. Mine is 87C. Anything over 90C is really dangerous.

Another thing to note. Most thermal tests are done with 20-25C room temp, as you said. Since your room temp will be over 30C, you can expect seeing over 10C difference between your normal temps and temp of those in colder areas (like here, summertime days outside is barely 22C ).

It's under the exact load before (Overwatch + Chrome/youtube + other apps). I dunno how to say it but cleaning dust reduced my heat by more than 40 C.

LogicalDrm · July 14, 2016

13 minutes ago, Kaian said:

It's under the exact load before (Overwatch + Chrome/youtube + other apps). I dunno how to say it but cleaning dust reduced my heat by more than 40 C.

Then you are good with just stock cooler. In the colder countries only real reason for getting aftermarket cooler is noise it makes.