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Hardware

CPU Heat w/ Distributed.Net Client? 19

Posted by Cliff from the can-you-scramble-eggs-on-that? dept.
yamla asks: "I run a dual-Celeron machine ( ABIT BP6) and primarily use Linux. I am concerned about heat and so I have added a second fan and used thermal paste. When I run the distributed.net client, the heat is CPU1:45C(113F), CPU2:49C(120F), SYS:55C(131F). Without this client running, my system is about ten degrees cooler at CPU1:34C(93F), CPU2:35C(95F), SYS:44C(111F). My question is simple. Should I stop running the distributed.net client or is this difference in heat nothing to be concerned about?" Wow! I've heard of hot software, but this might be too literal for comfort.
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CPU Heat w/ Distributed.Net Client? More

CPU Heat w/ Distributed.Net Client?

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  • This reminds me of a creative piece of writing that appeared a couple of years ago, where the author described a program that would heat up and cool down the CPU at sufficiently high enough rates that it would stress the CPU so much it would physically break. Perhaps this author was a little too close to the true than he might have well thought? :-)
  • Well, when you run rc5des, the system has alot more to do, so it heats up.
    If you have decent cooling (ie, good heatsink), it'll stay within spec. Can't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but those don't look too bad. If you can run rc5des for a long time without crashes, they forget about it. If you're not overclocking, you'll be fine. I run dual celerons in an extremly hot case (two big scsi drives in there, too), but things are just fine, since I have somewhere around 10 total fans (yes, it's loud). You don't need to go to that extreme.
    If it doesn't break, don't fix it.

  • ... and you're complaining? (Score:4)

    by darkrot ( 67297 ) on Friday March 03, 2000 @07:48AM (#1228214) Homepage
    The Intel datasheets (available here [intel.com]) say that TCase (the temperature of the chip casing on your celeron processor) is acceptable up to 85c (185 F). I think you have a long way to go before you need to start worrying. ;)

    On a comparative level, I used to have both a p133 and a p150, both which burnt your finger if you dared to touch them after a cpu-intensive job, but which never had any issues.

  • Have any of you been running th 2.3.X kernels on your board? I've found that when I do, I get APIC interrupt errors. This seems to be a problem specifically to the BP6 board, that is compounded when the board is overclocked, and when it i running hot. (as in the d.net client)
    Also, I would like more information on what people are using for that hardware monitoring. lm_sensors seems to be the only option I've found, with several different GUI interfaces. Are there any other options?

  • A bit on the hot side... (Score:3)

    by retep ( 108840 ) on Friday March 03, 2000 @10:37AM (#1228216)

    About 55 C is a bit on the hot side. Your probably best off getting a better heat sink for both of your CPU's and maybe adding yet another fan. Personally I perfer keeping my CPU's down in the 30 to 40 C range to reduce termal stress. All my systems have good enough cooling that they run at no more then 40 C (room temp 25 C) except for my junk Cyrix (got it for free as it's unstable due to being badly overclocked once) that runs at about 45 C

    Having your system 10 C cooler is not suprising at all. When you CPU is doing nothing Linux puts the CPU into a low-power mode. The second anything happens, such as a interupt, the CPU is instantly switched back on. In this low-power mode very little heat is produced, you can guess the results of that. :)

    Personally I wouldn't worry for now and keep on using Distributed.net Intel processors have pretty good heat tolerence. However while some people say that since the maximum temperature is 80 C you shouldn't worry at all I disagree. If you're running your CPU at 80 C you are going to cause quite a lot of problems! That's like always running your car at the red line. It won't wreck your engine immediatly but over a period of time will cause a lot of problems.

  • Never had problems with either of our BP6's here ... they have both run 2.3.x before without problems. Regarding heat ... We have our Cel500's running pretty hard here and with only the fans + heatsinks from Intel in action + no extra case fans we have NEVER even come within 10oC of the safe maximum it seems like the heat really plateaus after a certain amount of fast rise.
  • I use a BP6 with 366 MHz celerons at 550, and I get temperatures in the 39-45 deg. C range usually, and no problems. I have chatted with hard-core overclocker types who insist this is too hot, but these are the same people who also insist on using peltiers to cool their chips to sub-zero temps. ;^) As has been mentioned already, the official specs allow for much higher temperatures.

    As an intesting OT note, various OSes appear to put differing amounts of load on a CPU. In windows, with the d.net client running, my temp is around 40-42. In BeOS, with nothing running, the CPUs hover around 45-47 degrees. My best guess is that the Be idle loop includes some sort of instructions that make the CPU work more than even the d.net client does in Windows. I have no numbers for Linux, but that may be interesting to check out...

    -Smitty
  • As the other posters have said, I wouldn't worry about those CPU temperatures. I have a BP6 and have similar temperatures for my CPUs and it's rock solid in linux.

    The one thing that looks odd to me if your temperature for the motherboard. I think that in my case the CPUs were always higher than the SYS temperature. Does your case have adequate ventilation and cooling? (ie, more fans than just the one in the power supply, which is half covered by ribbon cables)

    Good luck,
    -OT

  • I am also thinking along the same lines. Try to get better case airflow.

    On my main system I use a 90mm fan infront of my hard disks. It also blows out. I really need a larger case as I've maxed out HD slots. Initialy I used cable ties to mount the fan to the HD holding bracktes. I later switched to a piece of cardboard cut to fill in the opening around the fan. I use screws to hold the cardboard to the front of the fan. The fan is now held in place by the cardboard only. When cutting the cardboard I sized it a little tight, and just jammed it in place. It provides a better air seal this way. I placed a couple of images on my web server. Fan and cardboard mounted [visi.com], and fan and cardboard from back side [visi.com] showing harddisks behind.

  • At a Comp USA, I've seen a fan that fits into an ISA slot. Any clue if it's any good? If so, it beats coming up with your own fan setup.
  • From what I remember from a VLSI course I took, there is always a problem with heat in ICs.
    In the normal operation of transistors there is a great deal of rapid acceleration of electrons going on. Especially, as feature sizes go down, switching speeds go up and heat goes up.
    Most electrons accelerate, as they should, from one end of the transistor (drain in, MOS) to the other (source, in MOS). But there are 'rogue' electrons that shoot off in other directions at high speed and hit the transistor itself (oxide layer below the gate, in MOS) and stay there. Eventually, as enough electrons do this, the transistor is damaged and will malfunction (in MOS, the oxide layer will begin conducting, which is bad).
    Hotter tempartures accelerate this process.
    This means that all modern ICs will eventually fail (feature sizes are sufficiently small, switching is fast enough and heat is high enough). From what I know, a pentium II is designed to last, on average, 10 years.
    The moral of the story?
    No matter what you do, your chip is going to fail eventually but you might be able to prolong its life by keeping it cooler.

  • Cool (Score:2)

    by dufke ( 82386 )
    First of all, isn't the 'sys' temperature you quote the temp in the case? If so, how can it be higher than the CPU temp... hardly possible as long as you are cooling with the case air and no peltiers. MB sensors are hardly the most accurate thermometers...

    My guess is that the increase in temperature caused by the dist.net client is the same increase as any other 100% CPU load software would cause. Modern x86 OS'es (which means Linux, NT etc. but NOT win9x) run a special idle instruction (the name of which I forgot) which powers down parts of the CPU when its idle. This is unlike apm/acpi 'suspend mode' etc. in that it is very fast, and wakeup only takes a few cycles. When the CPU load is 100%, the OS (obviously) has no time to run this instruction, and the CPU is fully powered all of the time.

    The point is that the dist.net causes no more thermal stress than any other CPU-heavy app (quake anyone? :-). And I very much hope you cooling is good enough to survive that. (Can you touch the heatsink without pain? Then you are OK.)

    (/rant)

    dufke

    -

  • First of all, isn't the 'sys' temperature you quote the temp in the case? If so, how can it be higher than the CPU temp... hardly possible as long as you are cooling with the case air and no peltiers. MB sensors are hardly the most accurate thermometers...

    What if the case sensor is in the hottest place on the motherboard? And the hottest place is *not* the CPU's. Quite possible actually. For instance harddrives, especially fast high-RPM models, can generate a lot of heat. If your harddrive is close to the case sensor your are going to get a lot of heat there.

    The CPU isn't the only thing getting hot on your motherboard too. There are all sorts of other chips and even a power regulator for the CPU. All of those can get very hot.

    There is one more possibility too... Depending on how the CPU fans are positioned they could be blowing hot air straight onto the MB heat sensor and taking in cool air from above the motherboard.

    BTW The idle instruction is HLT.

  • This brings up a question as I just bought a new Athlon system. I got a Microstar 6167 motherboard that doesn't have temperature sensors on it. There's a fan on the cpu, a fan on the power supply, and I just put a fan behind the processor on the case (blow out) and a fan on the front of the case (blow in). Now I'm getting complaints about the noise level of my computer. :P
    I was thinking of unplugging the front fan to reduce noise a bit. But I don't know how that will affect the temperature of this 650 mhz k7.

    Tips/Tricks anyone?
  • a switch :}
    i do this with my duel celeron system I have 3 of the 6 fans on switches and only run them when im playing games burning cds ect. This allows me to leave it on overnight. The temperature when im surfing the web is only 1 or 2 degrees warmer with them off.
    Talking about the bp6 iv verified that the motherboard temp sencer runs 10C over the auctual temperature and that the cpu sencers also run a bit high
  • I've had that problem with my bp6 too. Try booting with noapic=1, this disables the ioapic on your board so you'll lose a few irq's.
  • when i tried the 2.3.* kernels on the bp6, i got apic errors too, and upon investigation (aka, searching the logs of the kernel mailing list) it turns out that the kernel didn't start pointing out apic errors until the 2.3.* series....in other words, you get the same errors on 2.2.* but it doesn't point them out to you. It's not a problem with the board, it's a problem with the user pushing the cpu past the specifications. Not to start a flame war, but I've tried the overclocking scene, and its great when it works, but I learned the hard way that believe it or not, Intel knows what they're doing when they rate a certain chip at a certain speed. Better to spend more for a faster cpu than jump at every segfault convinced its a hardware problem or end up with corrupted filesystems.
  • heh. don't know about you, but I LIKE the idea of erring on the side of caution. Better it tell me the sys is 10 deg hotter than it really is, than to tell me its 10 deg cooler....

  • (I posted the original question, thanks everyone for all of your answers. They were most informative.)

    My understanding (from reading bp6.com [bp6.com]) is that the SYS temperature on this motherboard tends to be higher than the CPU temps because they placed the temperature monitor right around the voltage regulators. Because these things generate heat, the SYS temperature doesn't reflect the temperature of the motherboard in general.

    For what it is worth, I have experienced exactly zero lockups so far on my system that were not obviously driver related.

    Note that I am running two different speed celerons in my system. Using Linux 2.2.14, you need to disable the TSC skew correction in the kernel. If by chance you are in this situation, email me [mailto] and I'll send you the patch I use.

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