i720 system not Prime stable after installing Corsair H50. Help please!

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hobag

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Nov 2, 2006
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Hi all, I just installed my H50 last night and I'm having a little issue with it.

I installed the cooler with the radiator in an exhaust fashion with the supplied fan, as well as a silenx fan in a push pull config. My case has fairly good airflow, so no porblems there with this setup. I removed the stock TIM and replaced with AS5. Turned on the machine and my temps were the exact same as stock, about 35-40c on idle, and 80c on load. Hrmmm...

I'm not an entire newb, so I thought there might have been an installation error on my part. My first guess (which was the right one), was that I put too little AS5, and only the edges of the CPU were being contacted. Luckily I picked this up pretty quick (within a few minutes after full load I shut down).

Took it apart, and applied the right amount of AS5, reinstalled and it worked like it should. Temps dropped to 27-29c idle, and hovering around 60c on load (P95 torture).

So here's the problem: Even though the temps are fine, and the cooler is working like it should, I cannot finish prime without the computer shutting down completely. It runs for an hr or so, and the comp shuts down. During prime, the CPU never gets over 60c and according to CPU-Z the vcore goes up to about 1.1ish almost 1.2 on occasion. I don't know if it BSODs first then shuts down because I left it on before I went to bed, and when I woke up it was shut off. In the morning before work, I decided to try it again, loaded up prime, and left the house. I just called my brother (who is at home) and he says the comp is now shut off as well. Arghhh!!!

So why does it shut down? Everything is stock, no OC whatsoever and everything in bios is on auto. Prior to the H50, it was running stock HSF and it did prime flawlessly for 12 hrs straight, with the exact same settings all stock and auto.

Please help :-(
 
First thing, take all your BIOS setting off of auto. Set voltages, bclock and ram timings etc manually. Then go back and try it again.
 
Kangg said:
First thing, take all your BIOS setting off of auto. Set voltages, bclock and ram timings etc manually. Then go back and try it again.
Click to expand...

I fully get that, and I usually do, but I'm new to the i7 platform (i've been on hiatus since the opteron 175 days) so thought I'd keep it simple.

What I don't understand is why it would be prime stable before H50 with same bios settings, and then not prime stable after?
 
Could the VRM's be getting too hot? I know that people who use watercooling often find that one of their main problems is that the motherboard gets significantly hotter because of the lack of airflow that was previously supplied by the cpu fan.

But if you are running stock speeds it shouldn't be failing regardless. Where do you have the H50 pump plugged into for power?
 
The pump is plugged into the 4 pin CPU fan header as recommended by the instructions (also it's pretty intuitive since it's the only 4 pin header on the mobo...)

But like you said, VRM's wouldn't be THAT much overworked on stock speeds to shut down the entire comp.

I'm still stumped.
 
VRMs or the NB is overheating.. or both.

Get an old case fan... temp rig it up to blow on the area around the CPU and I bet it helps.
 
I will try this tonight when I get home and report back.

But overheat...on stock speeds? Really?
 
The only other thing I can think of is if you have fan control enabled in the BIOS and it is malfunctioning reading the pump speed. I heard of this happening once before with an H50. The guy had fan control enabled and the motherboard thought the fan was broken so it shut down the system. So try disabling all fan control options as well.
 
Thanks for the tip. I'll try this after I take cyclone's advice and add in a fan. The P6T comes with an optional fan for one of the heatsinks (not sure which chip it cools) when using water cooling or passive cooling on your cpu. There's another option to add a 40x40 fan on top of the NB, but I don't have one of those right now.

I'm running prime95 as I type, with constant full load and maxing out ram. I'll monitor closely the temps for the next little while, but as of this moment, everything looks pretty good. Load temp on cpu is 57c, NB is 44c.

Wish me luck, and I'll report back with results. =)

BlackDragon24 said:
The only other thing I can think of is if you have fan control enabled in the BIOS and it is malfunctioning reading the pump speed. I heard of this happening once before with an H50. The guy had fan control enabled and the motherboard thought the fan was broken so it shut down the system. So try disabling all fan control options as well.
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Yeah I have the H50 and P6T Deluxe as well. Let me know if the optional fan does anything
 
Ok, so my problem isn't fixed, but I am getting closer with the clues I found out tonight.

I have found out that when I run prime95 and watch movies, surf the net etc. at the same time, everything works fine and no shut down happens. Prime runs while I watch some movies, and the system is always maxed out at 100%.

But then once I stop doing anything on the computer and the screen turns off after 5 min of inactivity, a little while later (not sure how many minutes, but defintely under 30min), the screen will turn back on momentarily and I'll see a BSOD really quick, and the computer shuts down.

All the while, the temps stayed in check. Anybody have any ideas? My hunch right now is that it has something to do with suspend/sleep mode or a power saving function of some sort, so when the computer tries to sleep, the computer crashes. Don't understand how that would make sense, since prime95 is running, it shouldn't sleep right?

Running Win7 pro x64 btw.
 
Ok so I figured it out, and it was exactly what my hunch was. The problem was the suspend mode. Everytime the system went into suspend mode while the computer was priming, it gets a BSOD.

So how I cam to this conclusion was that I set the "put computer to sleep..." option to never. Ran prime, and it ran all night (and still running now actually) with no problems.

I assume I've figured out the cause of the shutdowns, but why does the sleep setting cause a BSOD and why is it only happening now and not before I installed the H50 (ie. while using stock HSF)?
 
A lot of high performance motherboard have trouble with sleep mode. Why exactly I do not know. But it is so common that one site now mentions if the board will suspend/resume properly in most of their reviews. OCing seems to make the issue worse.
 
Didn't know that but very interesting.

However, shouldn't sleep mode be determined by Windows? If my system is being primed (hence active), why would it initiate the sleep mode?

Prior to the H50 install, sleep mode wouldn't kick in during priming sessions. I don't understand what changed.
 
maybe some hidden code telling computer not to enter sleep mode if temps are over certain amount. maybe h50 keeps it cool enough so the computer thinks its ok to sleep. (shooting in the dark)
 
So I spoke too soon. I came home today and the computer was shut off again. Meaning that it was running prime throughout the day, BSOD and then shut down.

So apparently it wasn't because of the suspend mode? I'm so confused now. I was atleast seeing a pattern, but now it's just random. Sometimes it runs prime throughout the night and then sometimes it BSODs.

I am currently setting the ram timings manually to default spec. Let's see what happens, but I'm not hopeful right now =(

hobag said:
Ok so I figured it out, and it was exactly what my hunch was. The problem was the suspend mode. Everytime the system went into suspend mode while the computer was priming, it gets a BSOD.

So how I cam to this conclusion was that I set the "put computer to sleep..." option to never. Ran prime, and it ran all night (and still running now actually) with no problems.

I assume I've figured out the cause of the shutdowns, but why does the sleep setting cause a BSOD and why is it only happening now and not before I installed the H50 (ie. while using stock HSF)?
Click to expand...
 
Maybe try running a memtest86+ boot disk on the machine to eliminate the memory as a source of trouble. Let it run for an extended period of time like you are doing with prime. It may not find a problem but that in itself will narrow down the possibilities.
 
What exact speeds timings are you running the cpu and memory at, and at what exact Vcore, Vdimm, and VTT/QPI.
 
Quick update:

After changing the ram timings manually to 9-9-9-24 (default rating), the system has been priming since 11pm last night to right now with no issues. CPU temp is at 61c and NB is at 45c.

When set on auto, ram timings were at 8-8-8-20, which are lower than the default rating. Maybe this was the issue? We'll see what happens when I get home tonight.
 
a reboot issue usually leads to memory instability (mem controller or mem itself), cpu instability usually results in prime threads crashing and/or hard lockups.

If left to auto, my board would attempt more aggressive timings than my ram was rated at.
 
Slade said:
a reboot issue usually leads to memory instability (mem controller or mem itself), cpu instability usually results in prime threads crashing and/or hard lockups.

If left to auto, my board would attempt more aggressive timings than my ram was rated at.
Click to expand...

I think you might be right. I just got home and the computer hasn't shut off, still running prime like a champ and temps are still reasonable (CPU 63c and NB 45c), but my room isn't well ventilated and the room got hot.

So hopefully this is the end of my little problem and I can move on to some real overclocking and seeing what this h50 can do. After 20hrs and 23min of prime I will consider the system stable =P

Next up, I'll be lapping the CPU and waterblock, so I'm sure I'll be asking more questions along the way =)

Thanks for all the help from everyone!

Andrew
 
hobag said:
The pump is plugged into the 4 pin CPU fan header as recommended by the instructions (also it's pretty intuitive since it's the only 4 pin header on the mobo...)
Click to expand...
I just read this a few times to make sure... but this is wrong. The FAN (not the pump) has the 4-pin connector, and that's what should be plugged into the CPU fan header (which is 4-pins on the mobo). The PUMP (not the fan) has a 3-pin connector, and that should plug into a 3-pin connector on the mobo that is not throttled, so go into your BIOS and make sure it isn't throttling the power to the pump's header (sometimes called SmartFan).

So, do you have the right connector plugged into the right header? If the pump isn't getting enough power, this could explain your high temps.
 
I plugged the fan into the CPU header and my pump right into the PSU with an adapter. I bought an adapter from FrozenCPU with and RPM cable so I can monitor pump speed as well. Works like a champ.
 
Have you made sure you run your ram at the voltage they are specced at? So you are not undervolting them (this can most Definitely cause instability)

Check what voltage they are specced at and set it to that in the bios (or just a little bit below) because usually the ram voltage is much lower at default then what high performance ram wants to have.
 
That's a good catch, what I meant to type is what you typed. I have the 4 pin fan connected to the cpu connector, and the 3 pin pump to the sys_fan1 connector (which has 12v and q-fan disabled). Hmonitor says everything is running at the RPM's it should. So all is well.

Quick update: system was prime stable for over 20hrs on stock. I then OC'd to a modest 3ghz w/ no voltage incease and speedstep disabled, ran prime for 20hrs, no probs. I'll be moving on to 3.2ghz tonite.

I also just bought a range of sandpaper today to start lapping tomorrow. Will keep everyone posted on this. Thanks again.

Thug Esquire said:
I just read this a few times to make sure... but this is wrong. The FAN (not the pump) has the 4-pin connector, and that's what should be plugged into the CPU fan header (which is 4-pins on the mobo). The PUMP (not the fan) has a 3-pin connector, and that should plug into a 3-pin connector on the mobo that is not throttled, so go into your BIOS and make sure it isn't throttling the power to the pump's header (sometimes called SmartFan).

So, do you have the right connector plugged into the right header? If the pump isn't getting enough power, this could explain your high temps.
Click to expand...
 
Make sure to check it before you lap it, use a razor blade and see if any light comes under it. If you cant see anything, its probably fine and you might well make it worse by lapping something that is already flat.
 
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