Yes, but pros: play a highly intensive game for a few hours with your oil-cooled rig, and then you can make fries or something.
Your temperatures are way too extreme, looks like you don’t have proper heatsinks and thermal compound. A quality copper heatsink should keep (even an overclocked) CPU at 30 C idle at 65 C load. My GPU is stock cooled and has 40 C idle, 70 C load.
For the CPU I suggest you buy a custom cooler with copper heatsink, for the GPU I suggest you use compressed air to get rid of any dust blocking the airflow inside the videocard then download Rivatuner and turn up the fanspeed. When you play games crank the fanspeed up to 100% (can be pretty loud).
Installing a fan for intake in front of your PC to keep your HD’s cool and if you want you can install a big fan on the side of your case to help get rid of the air surrounding the memory modules and to get rid of some heat around the northbridge.
I have the following cooler for my i7 930, even though it’s not the best it does the job well (30 C idle for CPU, 65 C load) - I picked it for looks, there are several coolers that are slightly better.
Yeah your temps are way too high which is most likely why you are experiencing lock ups.
Open up your case and make sure everything is arranged in order to maximise air flow. If you can add some case fans that will help too. Try to have fans on the front or side of the case pushing air into the case and have fans on the rear of the case pushing air out.
+1 on the CPU cooler. Grab some isopropyl alcohol and a lint free cloth in order to clean the existing gunk off your CPU and some arctic silver 5 to replace it (if the heatsink already has thermal compound applied you won’t need to add more).
You could look at cases that increase airflow across components if you still aren’t seeing the results you want. I like the Antec P183 or the Antec 300.
I hope that helps.
All right, thank you very, very, much. I know I said that money wasn’t an issue, but thankfully I don’t have to dip into my savings now. I thought liquid cooling was going to be my last, best hope.
Hooray necro-post! I bought a Zalman and some arctic silver, it worked great, and all of a sudden it doesn’t. I’ve been playing New Vegas, Fallout 3, Crysis, TF2, Minecraft Classic and Alpha, and quite a few other games lately. I haven’t had a single overheat in all this time until all of a sudden it starts overheating again. I clean the dust out of my computer on a weekly basis, even if there isn’t a lot. I also cleaned the thermal paste off of my cpu and heat sink and applied a fresh layer. Nothing is helping. I’m going to be purchasing liquid cooling for both my cpu and my graphics card, along with a Cooler Master HAF X Ultimate Full tower case for my rig. Hopefully this will solve all of my problems and allow me to get back to gaming, studying, designing and all the other fun stuff I do with my rig. If this doesn’t work, I don’t know what the hell to do.
get a massive CPU cooler, my CPU is overclocked from 2.2 to 2.98 and it never reaches 50C.
doesn’t even have a fan on it, well it does but it’s turned off for winter.
Yep throwing money at it won’t solve this problem. You may even find it isn’t the same issue causing these problems.
What’s the full spec of your computer?
Could you have knocked something while cleaning your computer? Cleaning dust out of your PC on a weekly basis is a bit excessive, if you’re using compressed air you could have damaged some of the fans which could have caused them to stop working.
How is airflow in the case? Try to keep cabling out of the way of fans and the path of air to avoid overheating.
What temps are you seeing now when things crash? What code do you get when the computer crashes? In order to get a BSOD code you need to disable automatic restart on system failure.
Open up your PC case while it’s running and observe the fan behaviour.
dont get watercooling… you’ll find yourself in the same situation and a lot less money.
Right, go to your BIOS and tell it to go to default settings. If it already is, then look through it and set it to keep the temperatures as low as possible.
If you still have problems, then make sure that your fans are connected correctly to the motherboard.
If that doesn’t help then at least get a custom cooler for your CPU, something square and normal will work much better than that circle thing.
After that you should just find the nearest geek you know, and ask him to find out why it’s so hot. If you don’t know any, go to a computer repair store or something.
I took my computer to my mom’s friend who builds custom computers for a living and he said that my Zalman is actually broken. Idk how you can break a big piece of copper, but that’s what he said. I do plan on having him overclock my processor eventually, so I’m just going to buy liquid cooling anyway. My BIOS stuff is fine, my fans are all set up properly. And I’ve already asked a geek/expert. I’ve run out of options, so I’m going to just go with the liquid cooling and be done with it. My computer ran fine for a long time with the stock heat sink - fan combo, it stopped being effective a while ago. Then I upgraded to a Zalman with some Arctic Silver, and that worked great for about 2 months. I’m just going to upgrade my computer out of its cramped case and add liquid cooling. If that doesn’t work, I’m going to save up and build a custom rig so that way I know exactly what I’ve got in my computer, instead of this P.O.S. Asus pre-built rig. I didn’t want to buy it to begin with, but I needed something for school, and I needed it quick. Oh well.
Remember that you need to break in the thermal paste for about a week… only then will you notice your temperatures dropping to decent levels. If it still isn’t working properly then try adding more thermal paste and checking the fan on the CPU cooler, there’s no reason why your setup should be so hot with a stock cooler let alone an aftermarket Zalman.
I don’t think heatsinks can actually break, unless he meant that the surface touching the thermal paste is not smooth enough.
Don’t forget that the Zalman I posted earlier was my personal favorite because of the way it looks, there are better ones however the change in temperature wouldn’t be extreme.
Check if the fan is spinning fast enough, the airflow and if the heatsink is seated properly.
Other then that I don’t know what it could be, maybe you’re applying too much or too little thermal paste?
I think I’m going to slit my wrists. The fans on my computer are SUPPOSED to be set up so the front one sucks in cold air and the back one pulls out the hot air. The last time I took my computer to a diagnostic place they ripped my computer apart looking for my overheat problem, then they put it back together. They flipped the front fan around. I’m going back to them later today and demanding every penny back from them. Stupid old people. And I’m not just saying that because they are a few years older than me, I’m saying it because the guys who work there are somewhere between 60 - 70. I should have checked the fans first, but I guess its always the last thing you check. Hell, the guy who builds computers should have checked them when I took my rig to him, but he was concentrating on the heat sink since that’s the most obvious thing to check when your cpu is cooking itself to death. He also checked the cpu and the motherboard, but couldn’t find anything wrong with it. I really need to start doing this shit myself. I know how to, but I’m afraid I’m just going to break something. No more. From now on, I do all my own shit. Starting with liquid cooling. Now recommend something to me. Please.
Does anyone do TEC cooling anymore?
Their difference engine kicks the shit out of your gaming PC…
?
Google says:
the purpose that thing served could fit in a 0.003mm die inside your CPU and be calculated at nearly 100 000 000x the speed
Yeah but it’s heritage! One of the first computers ever. Also it was more popular with the ladies.
So going back to the original purpose of the thread…
If you are really intent on going for water cooling I wouldn’t recommend a complete kit as they are often inferior and may deteriorate quickly.
So a list of parts you will need are:
CPU water block
Radiator
Pump
Tubing
Barbs (connecting to tubing)
This guide helped me out when I chose to have a go at it.
I still recommend you stick to a decent air cooler, the Zalman will be fine for overclocking provided it’s working correctly and has all the case fans pushing air in the right direction [ 
].