If your computer was built in the recent past, it most likely has a heat-sink and fan CPU cooler in place. This is to prevent the most important chip in your machine from burning up like so much toast. Compared to all the technology that surrounds it, the lowly CPU cooler is not exactly rocket science. I mean, it's a funny-shaped hunk of metal with a little fan on top. That's it. It isn't rated in terms of how many million (or billion) things it can do every second, it doesn't have a connection to the system bus, it won't ever need more RAM or a bigger hard drive, etc. It's a pretty old-school device, really, a device whose sole purpose is to keep the CPU cool. This should be pretty simple, yes?
Apparently not. I recently found a workaround for what I thought was the very last obstacle to my having a working system. As regular readers and friends know, I recently had to rebuild my machine. Since that time, I've been going back and forth with Creative Labs about some issues I've had with my SoundBlaster Live! X-Gamer sound card. For the record, they've now escalated the whole thing up the technical support food chain, and I've recently dispatched a very detailed summary of my system configuration to them. They still haven't done anything to fix my audio problems since I first contacted them on 10/13/2002, but at least they haven't told me to buzz off like so many companies do.
At any rate, I've been having "stuttering" issues with the new system's audio as I've written elsewhere. As of this last week, I had a bit of a breakthrough, and I wanted to record it for all others who might be in this situation. I discovered that if I simply stopped trying to use the latest drivers from Creative Labs, then my audio stuttering problems go away. The latest drivers, dated 07/17/2002 as of this writing, have awful stuttering issues. The previous big release of the drivers, which I downloaded on 12/29/2001, work just fine. Granted, they have their own set of issues (e.g., occasional audio popping sounds, constantly forgetting my speaker configuration, etc.), but they're far more usable. The moral of that story, I suppose, is to never delete old driver versions. You never know when you might need them.
At any rate, since finding the work-around for my sound issues, I thought I was out of the woods. Naturally, I was wrong. The CPU cooler that I had on my machine prior to the big rebuilding had broken a fan blade. That was one of the less spectacular things that went wrong that day. As such, I had been waiting to fix that problem until I got my more important problems solved. After getting the sound fixed, I figured it was time for me to replace the CPU cooler. For sake of comparison, the old unit was a cheap, no-name unit. It was recommended by AMD for my CPU (an Athlon 1700+ XP), but it was definitely a low-end part. It featured a small, aluminum heat sink attached to an even smaller and noisy fan. Still, it kept my CPU around 40 - 45° C, which really isn't bad with a typical ambient temperature in the case of around 35 - 38° C. I figured I was trading up by getting something new.
I headed out to Fry's Electronics, and I asked one of the guys in their main computer aisle which cooler I should buy. He pointed me at a fancy looking unit with a large, copper heat sink and a pretty beefy looking fan. He said that it was definitely the best cooler they sold. Given that I had great success with the previous recommendation I got from their tech guys, I bought it up quickly and went home. I installed the new cooler and was quite surprised when the machine refused to start. Oh, it beeped just like it used to, and the hard drives spun up, but it then powered itself down shortly after the power-on-self-test (POST) results appeared on screen. Now isn't that odd?
I decided to check the BIOS to see if something was amiss with the fan speed, and I was quite alarmed to discover that my CPU was running at 110° C! For those who don't get the whole metric system (i.e., my fellow Americans), that's 230° F. It simply cannot be healthy for a CPU to run hot enough to boil water. I'll use my stove for that, thank you very much. So, the "best cooler" at Fry's was performing far less successfully than the cheap, broken component I had been using previously. That really doesn't give one much incentive to trade up, does it? Needless to say, I powered my system down post haste and tried a few different things. Eventually, with the help of a friend, I was able to get it working better.
The solution was utterly bizarre. Because of the way the mounting clip ran through the middle of the heat sink, there were only two ways it could be mounted, one with the side on which the power cable was mounted facing north and the other with it facing south. If I mounted it facing north, then my CPU temperature was between 70 - 90° C. If I mounted it facing south, then my CPU temperature was 50 - 60° C. I also discovered that using too much thermal paste is a bad thing, which is why I was originally cooking my CPU at 110° C. Once I started using a very thin layer of thermal paste instead, I got the much better temperatures listed above.
Still, this was unacceptable. Today was a very hot day in southern California. For whatever reason, after weeks of relatively cool days we have begun to "enjoy" a bit of a heat wave. The result was that my system was locking up frequently throughout the day today. I suspected it might be a heat problem, and after some testing with the case cover removed and an additional fan blowing air on the motherboard, I was able to confirm that suspicion. So, I called Fry's to find out if they would take back the other CPU cooler, and they said they would despite the fact that I had thrown out the box. Note well: this is one of the reasons I do business with Fry's. When something doesn't work, they do right by the customer; thus, I make sure I give them all the business I can muster.
My mistake during the last trip to Fry's had apparently been to trust a manager. I should know better by now. The amount of technical competency one possesses is inversely proportional to the square of one's altitude in the corporate hierarchy. In plain English, folk get dumber the higher up you go. When I went back to Fry's tonight, I returned the cooler I had bought, and I was able to find the same fellow who had given me the great recommendation on the motherboard. For sake of future reference, and to give him the credit he deserves, his name is Daniel. If you frequent the Fry's store on Kalama River Ave., near the Euclid exit from the 405 freeway, he is the guy to talk to, believe me. Daniel was able to point me at a great cooler, the Smart & Silent Volcano 9 from Thermaltake. I also picked up an extra 80 mm. fan for the front of my case. You would think the four fans that came with it would be enough, but at this point I was more than a bit paranoid.
When I got home, I read the directions—the Volcano 9 is a pretty fancy doodad—and then installed it. I decided to use its own heat sensor to allow it to adjust its speed based on the temperature of my CPU. I hooked everything up, double-checked all the connections, and turned on the power. My heart pretty much stopped beating when my system did nothing. I was afraid I had cooked my CPU (or worse). A few minutes of digging led me to the culprit, namely, the heat sensor for the cooler. The directions have you mount it between the base of your CPU and the zero-insertion-force (ZIF) socket in which it sits on the motherboard. Apparently, the CPU wasn't making good enough contact with the socket because as soon as I removed the sensor, my system booted up immediately. I would really like to use that little sensor thingy, but I'm not about to reinstall the cooler; it's incredibly difficult to get that thing's mounting clip connected.
To bring this tale to a close, the net result was easily worth the money. I've been pushing my system pretty hard tonight, and the largest discrepancy I've seen between the ambient case temperature and the CPU temperature is about 5° C. At this particular moment, the ambient temperature in the case is at 36° C, while the CPU temperature is at 37° C. That's a huge improvement from the over 60° C that was driving my machine to one hard lockup after another earlier today. It seems I may finally have wrung all the bugs out of my new system. At least this much is certain: I shouldn't be having any more heat troubles in the near future.
I can't help but wonder: why does the Volcano 9 perform so much better than the other unit? Did I simply get a defective part? Or was the whole model flawed? It was rated for anything up to an Athlon 2200+ XP CPU, so you would think it would handle my chip just fine. All I can say is that it didn't. I'll definitely be sticking with name-brand CPU coolers and Arctic Alumina thermal paste in the future. It's got my system running completely stable as near as I can tell. And that is simply priceless.
11/20/2002