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My components are in my sig, minus the fact that I have an ANTEC 300 case. Plenty of airflow considering I don't OC anything it should be fine. Yet my 860 sits at roughly 52 - 55 C idle. That seems a bit too high. I have properly applied AS5 and the stock intel HSF at least twice and I still seem to get the same temperatures, whether it be in the ANTEC case or an older LianLI PCV1000 i used to have. Wondering if there are really decent, and fairly cheap, quiet solutions to keep things a little cooler.

As it seems a lot of people are leaning towards the H212 HSF? I'd like around 30 - 40 USD. I feel like there is something funky with my stock cooler.

How are you checking the temperature? Two things to consider - sometimes applications running on Windows can get incorrect readouts, and I'm fairly sure that CPU usage is a lot higher than it ought to be while in the BIOS settings, so don't spend much time monitoring the readings there.

Presumably the problem isn't this or you would know by now, but it may be worth mentioning anyway - I once built an s1366 setup, and I thought I had the HSF installed correctly, it certainly looked ok (felt ok too, IIRC, but the memory is vague), but within about a minute of it being switched on, it went into thermal shutdown. The s1156 HSF installation is near-enough identical, so I wonder whether you could have not-quite-correctly installed the HSF, yet not screwed it up enough to cause thermal shutdown. I just thought I would mention it. I always have a hell of a time with anything Intel post Prescott wrt HSF installation.

I've built an i7-870 based setup and an i7-920 setup. IIRC the temperatures weren't as high as that on idle.

Yeah, I have reseated the stock 1156 HSF fan a couple of times now. Cleaning off the intel "goo" and then reapllying AS 5 per the instructions on their website. I sat the heatsink correctly, this is why I did it twice - or more, and still get idle temps around 50 ish. I don't know if it's a goofy stock HSF or what, but temps aren't nearly where they should be. In F@H SMP all eight cores it ramps upwards of 75- 78 C.

1.04 Vcore
Stock freq
stock XFX 5850
1600 MHZ XMP profile, due to my ram being 1600mhz.

Monitoring the temps in HWmonitor.

Anything else I should be looking at? LIke i said previously - all components are in the sig.

As a side note, do you blokes thing I should be using any program besides HWMonitor for CPU temps?

As long as you compare the results from your software with what the BIOS reckons the readings are, and as long as they're within 5C of each other, I would assume the software is correct.

I used to use SpeedFan, but it doesn't work for my ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 board. I'm just using Asus's own software at the moment to get readings.

Any suggesttions? Possibly for something in the 30 - 45 dollar range for 1156 that is quiet and might keep a stock 860 at around 32 - 35?

The Cooler Master Hyper 212+ is probably your best option. It's $30, it's a tower style heatsink that cools very well and is quiet. There's a reason it has hundreds of reviews on Newegg.

I was probably leaning towards that one, I assume it'll fit in a 300? G.SKill Ripjaw ram?

I want some idles of low 30's.!!!!!!

It does. I've got 4 sticks of ripjaws, and the hyper 212+
Very satisfied.
Not in a 300 case mind you. So I can vouch for height. Does the side fan ( if you have on on there ) sit above the cpu socket?

MaxTheLimit wrote:

It does. I've got 4 sticks of ripjaws, and the hyper 212+
Very satisfied.
Not in a 300 case mind you. So I can vouch for height. Does the side fan ( if you have on on there ) sit above the cpu socket?

No side fan, just vent. I have the back, top, and two front fans.

Should be fine for height then. It is a tower cooler, so very tall. But even with the plastic brace ring on the side of my case the height wasn't an issue. If there is just case panel above your cpu then I don't think it's a problem. on the gigabyte GA-P55-USB3 that you have the ram slots are close to the CPU socket relative to my MSI P55-GD65, but the fan on the cooler is actually just above the heat spreader of the ripjaws. So, while it may be a bit more annoying for you having them so close, everything should fit.

Do you guys suggest just one fan or two, push and pull? Keeping in my I want it to be quiet because it's on nearly all the time one would probably suffice or cooling and audible parameters.