[Cew27]

hello as you may know i have an intel core 2 quad (q6600) its the go stepping one and idles at about 35 ish and goes to about 55 on load (crysis) at the moment it is at stock speeds but im wondering do you think i have some overclocking leeway with this? and if so how much ?
secondly i found these temps to be a bit high with my cooler but i have tried re-seating it many times and get the same temps, now i have another bnip arctic freezer 7 with some arctic cleaning and preparing fluid, do you think its worth reseating it with the new (un tampered cooler) as when i sat the original freezer 7 i used meths and cotton buds to clean it, so would i see lower temps using one that i will clean with proper alcahol and same with the processor heatspreader or will i see no difference in temperatures ?
third question is what do you recommend i clean the cpu and heat sink with i know they recommend lint free cloths but i dont know what these look like? is there any special cloths used just for this purpose ?

and last but not least i came across this on overclockers it looks to me like it is just the standard q660 but with warranty to run up to 3.3ghz?


this time it really is the last question, what is the highest safe temp you think my cpu should go?
i hope that made sense, thanks for reading

[gaza14]

show off

[spot]

Go on, it's a real question he's not showing off.

Lint is fluff. If you take something cotton and rub a fingernail on it you get small specks of fluff ball up. That's lint. A lint-free cloth doesn't lose specks of lint. It matters because a speck of lint, just like a hair would, holds the heatsink clear of the processor and makes the heat have to flow through a mountain of compound instead of a thousandth as much.

The fluids either have a chemical name or a brand name. There ought to be one good at dissolving old compound but it's allowed to leave surfactants behind when it dries (that's soap, sort of). There ought to be another which is also good at dissolving the last traces of compound out of the atoms-thick scratches but which has to evaporate off completely and not leave a non-volatile scum behind. Check in a dictionary, non-volatile is very meaningful in this context. Most brands or chemicals for that last phase are isopropyl alcohol, acetone or ether. Anything you buy for cosmetics has oils in that make them unsuitable.

So - in my opinion - unless you tried lapping your heatsink and screwed it up then there's no difference between one and the other, if they're the same model. The old one's perfectly cleanable.

I'd be happy enough using meths for the first few washing steps, but not for the final one because it's got a dye in it that stays behind. Cotton buds can leave fluff too, you need something advertised as lint-free. A camera shop will have a £2.50 cloth you can use for the next hundred years.

I'd be unhappy taking a processor over 75 degrees. I don't like edging over 70 for long periods. Bear in mind that whatever you set it up like, there'll be a hot day in August when your room's at 34 degrees instead of 20 and the processor will be 14 degrees higher than you meant it to be.

[gaza14]

no i know him from real life and he goes on about his computer non stop

[spot]

I'm sure he knows it's not what you can buy that counts, it's what you can do with it. And he's obviously learning how to be competent because he's asking sensible questions.

I could go out and buy a box that would outsmoke any other two boxes put together but that's nothing like so much fun as tweaking the last drop of performance out of a five year old machine the rest of the world laughs at. On a good day it's the difference between stock car racing and formula one.

[Cew27]

thanks for that spot, i didn't have any isopropic alcohol at hand when i did this i did have some for my camera lens but that decided to immigrate to the unknown.