Writing to a logfile

[jj2007]

The method I finally used was open>setfilepointer>write>close every 500ms.

Wise decision  ;)

[CommonTater]

The GPU temps can go from 52 to 62 in 2-3 seconds, this is normal for the card (GTX 580).
What NVidia won't say is the upper limit, so 80C might be OK on one system but overheat on another.

It's 97 celsius... just below the boiling point of water.

http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-580/specifications

In my experience NVidia chips are furnaces.  They naturally run very hot, heat up very quickly and cool rather slowly. 


For the AMD temps ... 60c is recommended max on most of their chips.  90c can kill it.

http://products.amd.com/pages/desktopcpudetail.aspx?id=34&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

There are several things you can do to improve the temperature problem...

1) When it's warm shut it down and immediately (as in within a few seconds) remove the Heat Sink... carefully clean away all that silly rubber crap from the cooler and the chip, let it cool, and redo the thermal junction with a thin layer of this stuff  (One stick does about 150 chips) The Thermstrate will take a couple of days to reach maximum effectiveness but it works wonders. My dual core CPU is runs about 5 to 10c above ambient with the stock cooler.
 
2) Make sure the bottom of the heat sink is flat!  I use a "draw file" technique to clean and level the bottoms of heatsinks on systems that overheat.  Some people will lay down 100 grit sandpaper on a flat surface and run the heat sink back and forth, to get the same effect... turn often and stop when the entire surface is evenly patterned. Clean it gently with steel wool to remove fine particles and then do step 1.
 
Note: DO NOT polish it! Leave it with the scratches... the scratching holds thermal compound in place.
 
3) Enable "Cool and Quiet" on the CPU.  This is load driven throttling.  The CPU runs at about 40% speed until it needs to go faster.  This will bring your temperatures down considerably.
 
4) Go aftermarket for your cooler... If you are overclocking AMD chips you have no choice but to go with liquid cooling... Like This ... or better.   
 
Hope that helps....
 

[dedndave]

it would have been helpful if they had put a bit of heat sink on there   ::)



at any rate, going from 52 to 62 C in 2 or 3 seconds is a bit surprising
it takes a certain amount of energy to change the tempurature of a certain mass by some delta

[CommonTater]

it would have been helpful if they had put a bit of heat sink on there   ::)



at any rate, going from 52 to 62 C in 2 or 3 seconds is a bit surprising
it takes a certain amount of energy to change the tempurature of a certain mass by some delta

That's an OEM board, intended to be sold to manufacturers who would then mount their own brand name covers and heatsinks and resell the board.

I hope you didn't power it up like that... damage can occur in just a few seconds...

[dedndave]

crappy engineering, then
i would never put a product on the market that will fry itself - lol

[CommonTater]

crappy engineering, then
i would never put a product on the market that will fry itself - lol

I think you're missing the point, Dave... 

That board, without a heat sink and cooling covers, was never intended for retail sale.
It's a wholesale item intended to be sold to other computer companies, not end users.

Ok, you're "Joe's PC Emorium" and you want to sell video cards with your name on them... So you order 5,000 of these things with no cooling solution... and you order 5,000 cooling setups with your company logo on them.  You do a little assembly and sell the boards under your own name.

It's not bad engineering... it's just a level of the business most people never see.
Whoever put that up for retail sale was irresponsible in the extreme ...

[dedndave]

i get that

but - i say nvidia is missing the point...

they should put the heatsinks and fans on there and mark up the cost
they are missing out on a piece of profit
not to mention, they maintain control over the thermal considerations
if the OEM wants their logo on there, sell it to them that way and mark it up again   :t

[CommonTater]

but - i say nvidia is missing the point...

That may be true ... but it isn't how the industry works.
Actually ... I hope you don't mind but I'm going to expand on this a bit...

Right now, there are versions of that board with Gigabyte, Asus and MSI brand names on them.  All sell cheaper than the NVidia branded board.  This is why they do that... NVidia makes a lot more money selling that barebones board than they do retailing their own produces... by orders of magnitude more.  Wholesaling in batchs of 1,000 or more is far more lucritive than retail could ever be.

It's a real hoot listening to two geeks in a coffee shop arguing if the Gigabyte version is better than the Asus one.  "The Gigabyte outperforms Asus every time"... "No the Asus has a better display".... Ummm guys... it's the SAME BOARD!

This kind of rebranding happens all the time...

At one time Radio Shack's CB radios were made by Cobra... and people would tell me RS is crap get a Cobra if you want a REAL radio. 

Sears Canada used to sell a whole line of stereos that were just JVC boards in Sears cases... People would tell me that JVC is so much better.  (the real difference was the speakers.)

The radio shack CB was half the price of the equivalent Cobra model.
The Sears stereos were often 1/3 or less the price of the equivalent JVC component.

This could not happen without rebranding.

[qWord]

it is common to remove the cooler for photos because people want to see what they pay for ( ::)) - such 'heating elements' can't work without a cooler  :icon_cool:

[CommonTater]

it is common to remove the cooler for photos because people want to see what they pay for ( ::)) - such 'heating elements' can't work without a cooler  :icon_cool:

Yes they can... For a few seconds until they overheat and self-destruct.

I once worked for a company that got a contract to supply 300+ computers to a large office building.  NONE of the computers worked on delivery and it fell to me to fix them... Every one of them had a damaged CPU chip on the motherboard.  What they did in the assembly plant was to fire them up "bareback" for a quick check, then they finished the assembly adding pre-loaded hard drives, fans, coolers, etc. and shipped them out without turning them on again.  They had gotten enough time to default the BIOS... and had damaged every CPU chip in the process.

Dave already indicated he had the version without the heat sink.
And... yes you can order that barebones board from NVidia in quantities of 100 or more...

[hutch--]

Funny enough I lost a good quality video card some years ago because one of the clips that held the heat sink onto the main video chip pulled out and it fried the chip very quickly. It was no joy to diagnose as the machine would not even boot so I had to do it the hard way, pulled all of the cards out of it and tested different cards one at a time. I had an ancient PCI video card to test with and it worked so I then carefully pulled the video card apart and found the heat sink had move just enough to not seat on the chip.

I made sure the next one did not have any heat sink mounting problems.  :P

[sinsi]

Well, the 90C was reported by the motherboard utility (ASRock OC Tuner) but I finally got Core Temp to work.
When ASRock says 85, Core Temp says 55, so I am more inclined to believe Core Temp (AMD say 67 is top).

I think ASRock uses motherboard sensors whereas Core Temp has a driver that queries the CPU cores.

[jj2007]

Just installed Core Temp out of curiosity. It says core #0 30°, core #1 24° - and that doesn't change when running the proggie below. CPU is AMD 4450B.

include \masm32\include\masm32rt.inc

.code
start:
   .Repeat
      xor ecx, ecx
      .Repeat
         dec ecx
      .Until Zero?
      print "*"
      invoke Sleep, 1
      invoke GetKeyState, VK_SHIFT
   .Until sword ptr ax<0
   print "bye"
   exit

end start

[sinsi]

Single threaded, your proggie is a consistent 17% CPU usage (1 out of 6 cores), no effect on temps.
Spawn 6 threads though, I will give it a go.