Folding Forum

Hello.
I recently built a pc with an am4 b550-f motherboard, ryzen 5 3600 cpu amd radeon 5500xt gpu. I am using the stock cooler which had some kind of thermal material already on it. I added a rice size amount of arctic silver in addition. This is all in a Fractal Meshify C case with an intake fan, output fan, cpu fan and psu fan. Normally my cpu idles at 40 to 50 c but with folding at home on medium settings the cpu runs in the mid - 80s and the gpu at 66. I would fold at the lowest setting but that doesn't allow me to use my gpu. My question(s) are, is it ok that I added a little thermal paste to the cooler or is that causing my temps to be a little high? Is this normal for folding at home and my hardware? I know that the max for this cpu is 95 deg c but it is recommended to be below 80 if you run it for long periods of time.

Thank you in advance.

Jeff

If you have Artic Silver clean the old material off before you use it as the old material will still be the limiting factor for thermal transmission ... getting a nice clean AS mating of the CPU and Cooler may just get you the temp reduction you are looking for ... but if you can swap out the stock for a better air cool or even AIO then you should see significant reductions to easily meet your sub 80 desire ... you may find you can run full CPU load and your GPU within this goal.

Stable high temperatures below TJmax shouldn't wear/degrade you CPU particularly (but I am an Intel Server CPU user and they are designed for this) ... Running "Spikey" Thermals up to that level would overtime be much more wearing as for the most part it is the "heat cycling" that causes issues ... and running FaH tends to keep the CPU nice and warm but on a stable basis ... and so for me and my kit mid 80s temp consistent loading isn't an issue.

thermal paste has little impact; I wouldn't worry about it. the stated temps of 80C are not surprising and well below the maximum at which the cpu would begin to throttle. I've never heard of a "recommended max for long running"; the cpu doesn't work like that. your idle temp seem high; what's your ambient temp in the room?

bottom line, fah will use what it can. that will drive temperatures to the limit of your hardware's capability. If it's too hot for you, either a) use fewer cores on your cpu and limit the power on your gpu or b) improve your cooling by whatever your ability and budget will allow.

forget about the paste.

thermal paste may not have much impact if any on top of thermal pad - thermal pad may well be less thermally conductive than thermal paste, hence my suggestion to get rid of it and just use AS - this might help both idle and load - maybe not by much (a couple of degrees) but might make the OP more comfortable with the temps ... fairly sure biggest "bag for buck" improvement would be to replace stock cooler - but there might be something in the airflow setup that isn't helping?

https://blog.arctic.ac/blog/2015/07/23/ ... mal-paste/

I would add another 140 mm intake fan to the front of the case. There's a lot of unfiltered mesh in the lower back of the case, and I'd take advantage of that by getting more filtered intake air flowing over the graphics card, and making sure you have positive air pressure in the case.

Have you enabled D.O.C.P. (AMD's name for XMP)? Running a faster memory profile can give a much higher performance boost than enabling PBO or even CPU overclocking. D.O.C.P. is on the front screen of the EZ mode setup, or under Ai Overclock Tuner in the Advanced mode.

Keep the EZ System Tuner on Normal (e.g. TPU off in Advanced mode or Core Performance Boost on) - your CPU is much more efficient on random workloads when it's allowed to regulate its own frequencies.

jeffmr4 wrote:I would fold at the lowest setting but that doesn't allow me to use my gpu.

The Folding Power slider is a very coarse control. If you want to limit the folding power on the CPU while still running the GPU, open Advanced Control, click Configure, go to the Slots pane, edit the CPU slot and change the number of CPU threads to something like 4 or 6. I'm running CPU 10 threads + GPU folding on my 3600 but I have a Noctua air cooler on it.

jeffmr4 wrote:I am using the stock cooler

This is your issue ...

The stock cooler of the 3900x was so bad, I had to lathe the bottom plate to actually get better cooling.
It would thermal throttle at an all core load, and the surface was VERY badly done.
THat being said, as soon as I finished leveling out and smoothing the heat sink, my water cooling system arrived, and I just did watercooling.

The stock cooler is up or under. Some are very badly done.

The stock cooler for the Ryzen 9 3900 X is the Wraith Prism RGB. I found it adequate for cooling a non-overclocked Ryzen 7 2700X, except for the fan noise. Those two processors have the same TDP, although that number is a bit misleading when it comes to actual thermal output. I got an AM4 mounting kit for an old Noctua NH-D15S air cooler, and that was overkill for the 2700X.

I have an NH-U12S AM4 cooler on my Ryzen 5 3600, and is both quiet and cool enough.

Thank you for all the replies.

gunnarre wrote:The stock cooler for the Ryzen 9 3900 X is the Wraith Prism RGB. I found it adequate for cooling a non-overclocked Ryzen 7 2700X, except for the fan noise. Those two processors have the same TDP, although that number is a bit misleading when it comes to actual thermal output. I got an AM4 mounting kit for an old Noctua NH-D15S air cooler, and that was overkill for the 2700X.

I have an NH-U12S AM4 cooler on my Ryzen 5 3600, and is both quiet and cool enough.

I would guess the 2700X keeps itself better to the 105W TDP, than the 3900x/3950x?
Because both those ran horrible with the stock cooler,
And on an all core load at 150W (~4Ghz on 24 or 32 threads), even a Cooler Master MasterLiquid LC240E (240mm watercooler) runs the CPU at 90C (80F @ ambient)

It isn't necessary to add extra thermal paste on top of the paste that is already there. Thermal paste is a form of thermal interface material (TIM). Its only purpose is to fill in the tiny pits and valleys in the machined surfaces of the heatsink on the CPU and the cooler. Its thermal conductivity is worse than the metal, so too much paste impedes heat flow. Adding more to what is already provided by the factory (an engineered solution) won't hurt anything, but it won't be as thermally efficient.

I recommend getting some really good rubbing alcohol (90% or higher) or Arctic's proprietary cleaner, or using acetone (be careful not to breathe it or get it on your skin) to thoroughly clean both surfaces. Reapply a rice-sized grain of Arctic Silver or Arctic MX-4 thermal compound. I expect the temps will drop by 2-3 degrees C. It's probably not the temp drop you're looking for though.

As to why that processor is running hot, it's because the stock behavior of all Ryzen-series chips (and the latest Intel's as well) is to really push for clock rate / voltage and throw efficiency out the window. This is the "turbo boost" feature (Intel) or "Core Performance Boost" (AMD). It pushes the chip very hard to eek out 10-20% more performance at the expense of generating lots of heat (and sucking power from the wall). This auto-overclocking behavior makes sense for transient tasks and gaming. For steady-state high performance number crunching, where the load never lets up, processors will get warm. For folding on the stock cooler, I recommend disabling core performance boost in the BIOS. It will cap the clock rates at the stock maximum (basically disabling factory overclocking) and will be a better long-term solution for system stability.

For reference, my Ryzen 9 3950x with a huge Noctua cooler on it runs at about 50C when folding on all 16 cores with core performance boost disabled, but gets up to 90C when CPB is on. It's hot, but it's still less than the 95C the processor is rated for, so it should be fine. It's just heating up my room a lot and fighting my air conditioning / jacking up the power bill. If your processor were to get too hot, it would automatically throttle to prevent damage, so there's really not too much to worry about, and at 80C you've still got some headroom.

My 3950 only sees 90C if ambient is close to 95F.
I often see 60C or lower, thanks to a triple 120mm fan radiator, closed loop water cooling system.

I have a Ryzen 7 3700X with a Noctua NH-D14 cooler. Since the warm spell in Seattle, I have had a tough time keeping nominal CPU temp below 80C and max CPU temp below 90C, so I deleted the CPU slot. I tried reducing the Folding cores to 8, but that had minimal effect.

I saw Paragon's post about disabling Performance Boost, but was initially skeptical that the temps could be reduced that significantly. However, I disabled PBO and Core Performance Boost, and I got the same result he did - 53C nominal and 55C peak, Folding on 12 cores! I was less surprised when I looked at HWInfo and discovered that package power consumption was reduced from 90 Watts to 58 Watts!

Apparently, PBO will allow significantly more than the spec'ed 75W TDP, as long as the CPU temp remains below max allowable.

So, I'll just keep PBO disabled for the summer and Fold away!

That's pretty dramatic improvements in efficiency, but it tracks with what manual overclockers report: They can reach a stable all-core overclock frequency which eeks out a few extra percent of performance in benchmarks, but the power usage becomes very high.

One caveat about disabling Core Performance Boost though: If you have a high performance Nvidia GPU, and get a GPU work unit which needs a lot of CPU polling, then a higher core frequency can help push out more PPD from the GPU. In those cases, if you're not CPU folding, then leaving Core Performance Boost on might give a higher PPD from the GPU. I don't know if it helps total PPD/watt, but it seems to help total PPD.

I did a bit of testing on the Ryzen 7 2700X (previous generation of the 3700x) feeding an RTX 2070, and found that on some work units, the total system PPD increased when the CPU slot was paused and only the GPU was folding, with CPB on. This appeared to be entirely correlated to core frequency, but the effect varied between work units. I found that on balance, CPU SMT folding made up the difference most of the time, so I'm still running the CPU - but total system PPD/watt might be worse than just leaving the CPU slot off.

My GPU is a 1050ti, so I doubt it will clobber the 3.6 GHz CPU...

With PBO and CPB on, peak clocks were in the 4.2 GHz range. That means it took 55% more power for 16% more performance - definitely diminishing returns!

The down side appears to be that the CPU does not downclock at idle. Even so, idle power consumption is still at around 24 Watts, same as with PBO+CPB enabled. MSI is implementing the new AGESA with the next BIOS update (still in Beta). i've seen rumors that power handling will improve, so things may change soon.