Easter Weekend Clean Out + Mini Upgrade

[JunJun9000]

Just thought I'd share my little Easter weekend project with you...

My system is by no means state of the art, its a modest 3 year old setup which has served me well over that period and is still going strong for what I use it for. The only annoying thing was the noise of the stock AMD heatsink (especially under load) so I thought why not upgrade it to one of those newfangled all-in-one water coolers. At the same time take it completely apart and give it a good clean out as the dust was building up after 3 long years.

So here it is:



The innards and my terrible cable management! Its become a mess because I'm constantly swapping hard drives:



The Corsair H40:



Dismantled completely apart from the DVDRW drive as it is still in remarkable condition even though its from an older 5 year old rig:



Brace yourself!





Removing AMD heatsinks always scares the crap put of me as I have, on several occasions, pulled the CPU out with it even though I go through the whole rotating it back and fourth. This time though, I cheated; took the whole thing off including the retention bracket, in one go. Win!



The old stock heatsink looking sorry for itself. They're not all bad though, idle temps were 20C and 55C on load; just noisy.



Check this bad-boy out, X2 7750+ BE vintage 2009.



New Corsair retention bracket fitted:



After vacuuming the whole bare case out and blasting the components with compressed air, it was time for everything to go back in plus the new Corsair H40.



Couldn't get all the dust out of the graphics card....



But cable management is a little better, right?



Nakey shot:



All up and running again!



I was amazed by the idle CPU temps after switching it back on! Here's a before and after shot of HWMonitor:






A frosty 5 degrees!! Haven't tested it on load yet. Only downside was the noise of the included Corsair fan, it was just as loud as the stock AMD heatsink so I decided to unplug it and temps rose to ~20C idle. Could do with a quieter fan or a speed controller ideally.

Sooo what do you think of my little upgrade? I hope its inspired someone to at least clean the dust out of their system! lol

[RcRon7]

That looks like a very much needed cleaning project. Good Lord I thought I was going to sneeze looking at it.

I have an H80, and I love it. It's on my AMD 8120 and I'm sitting at 59F right now. It hits 79 when folding kicks in, and 69 to 70 when playing BF3 or Tribes Ascend. Those coolers work very well.

Oh, and much better job on wire management.

[Fuganater]

Holy huge photos batman...

[JunJun9000]

Originally Posted by Fuganater

Holy huge photos batman...

Get faster internetz, Robin.

[zsolt_93]

I am not quite sure.Those temps don't seem to be right. Idle at around 20 degrees on stock cooler? Almost impossible. Using water cooler getting temps below ambient is a no-go again, unless you have 5 degrees in the room too . Sensors are known to be inaccurate, so temps might be a goo 10-15 degees higher then what is displayed.

[JunJun9000]

Originally Posted by zsolt_93

I am not quite sure.Those temps don't seem to be right. Idle at around 20 degrees on stock cooler? Almost impossible. Using water cooler getting temps below ambient is a no-go again, unless you have 5 degrees in the room too . Sensors are known to be inaccurate, so temps might be a goo 10-15 degees higher then what is displayed.

You may be right but still, a relative drop in 15C from stock to aftermarket cooler isn't too bad if I do say so myself. Also I tested it out on full load today, with the fan on, temps were reported to be ~25C and ~35C with fan off.

[Fuganater]

Originally Posted by zsolt_93

I am not quite sure.Those temps don't seem to be right. Idle at around 20 degrees on stock cooler? Almost impossible. Using water cooler getting temps below ambient is a no-go again, unless you have 5 degrees in the room too . Sensors are known to be inaccurate, so temps might be a goo 10-15 degees higher then what is displayed.

I agree. Those temps are impossible with a H40