How cool do your systems run?

[Lensjocky]

Here's my rig idling then starting a "Handbrake" video compression.
Idling temp about 28c then 68c at full throttle.

i7-6700k OC to 4.4 ghz, 64 gb ram, Nvidia GTX 970.
Corsair Hydro Series H105 Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler.

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Wow! 21C - 31C is great! Is it safe to assume that you are using a water cooler?

I used the Asus AI Suite to do the overclocking and it set the voltage to 1.375. I tried manually doing adjustments once but never achieved results as good as what the AI Suite had, so I left well enough alone.

I have no idea why, but the Noctua heatsink still remains cool to the touch even when the CPU is pushed 100%. I did delid my CPU and used CoolLaboratory Liquid Ultra between the die and IHS and again between the IHS and Noctua.

Well writing this right now the CPU is at 30C and the room at around 25C

No, no water here - all air. But like I say, it's a frugal CPU (one of the reasons most of my builds have used the 4mb cache i3 models). I've held off buying a 7th gen i3 CPU for two reasons - 1) they aren't yet fully supported in macOS and 2) the like-for-like chip is 51W instead of 47W!!

Like you (and @zipb I'll reply to in a moment) I love Noctua equipment. Currently I have a 120mm Noctua fan attached to a big Zalman air cooler which has 4x copper heat-pipes and that's what keeps the system cool. That and simple airflow through the case I guess.

 

[UtterDisbelief]

I'm using a huge Noctua D15 with 2 fans in a Fractal Design R5 case with 2 standard fans. Cool and quiet.
@pastrychef: Maybe 4.7 overclock is lots more watts/heat for very little gain? I'm running at 4.6 GHz currently... 4.7 works too, but my Geekbench hardly rises but temps do...

I'm very curious how the CPU of a system can have a lower temp than the environment... Even with my fans at full bore CPU temps will never be the same/lower than room temp.

Hi @zipb Yes, I can understand your scepticism. I would add the 21C only occurs early on, not after actively running for any length of time. As for the refrigeration effect of air-flow lowering the temperature below ambient, well that is certainly possible. It's a function of air-flow over surface-area... Incidentally, remember those crazy experimenters with their peltiers? The big fly-in-the-ointment with them was condensation short-circuting valuable chips. Way below ambient!

Apart from that I'm air-cooled in a roomy aluminium case with carefully thought-out air-flow. I've just checked BIOS health by rebooting and am at 30C with a room at 25-ish. I always compare temps with "me". Being human I run at 37C most of the time so my PC is always running cooler than me!

 

[pastrychef]

Well writing this right now the CPU is at 30C and the room at around 25C

No, no water here - all air. But like I say, it's a frugal CPU (one of the reasons most of my builds have used the 4mb cache i3 models). I've held off buying a 7th gen i3 CPU for two reasons - 1) they aren't yet fully supported in macOS and 2) the like-for-like chip is 51W instead of 47W!!

Like you (and @zipb I'll reply to in a moment) I love Noctua equipment. Currently I have a 120mm Noctua fan attached to a big Zalman air cooler which has 4x copper heat-pipes and that's what keeps the system cool. That and simple airflow through the case I guess.

Yeah, I recently picked up a laptop with an i3-5005U. It has a TDP of 10W and runs unbelievably cool. Even though the laptop has a fan, the only time I've ever been able to force it to spin up was when I ran Handbrake and pushed the CPU to 100%.

Under normal room temperatures, the CPU operates at 42C and the fan never spins up. This has proven to be an amazing laptop and absolutely everything works perfectly with macOS except for the built-in SD card reader.

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Yeah, I recently picked up a laptop with an i3-5005U. It has a TDP of 10W and runs unbelievably cool. Even though the laptop has a fan, the only time I've ever been able to force it to spin up was when I ran Handbrake and pushed the CPU to 100%.

Under normal room temperatures, the CPU operates at 42C and the fan never spins up. This has proven to be an amazing laptop and absolutely everything works perfectly with macOS except for the built-in SD card reader.

That sounds like a very well thought-out laptop and a good find. They're notorious for letting their CPUs heat up, so 42C is pretty ... good (I was going to say "cool" !) I always remember being told in my early days building PCs - heat is the enemy - but I'm frankly surprised what the temperature tolerances are for modern CPUs.

 

[zipb]

At one point, I had it set to 4.6GHz and it was still over 20K. I think the RAM plays a considerable roll to the overall score.

I did another round of tweaking, and removed some wrong/superfluous values in Clover/config.plist a while ago. Especially my RAM values were wrong(RAM type and speed not properly recognized in OSX afterwards).
This also fixed the crashing "About This Mac..." window in Sierra.
I'm now hitting 22k in GeekBench. Yay!