Nexxen wrote on 2025-12-25, 10:26:

Tested my new 5800X.
I need to buy some AIO because it goes to 90°C like nothing.
I'm currently learning about undervolting.

Did you peel the sticker from the coolers heatplate before installing it? 😜

GigAHerZ wrote on 2025-12-25, 12:47:

Nexxen wrote on 2025-12-25, 10:26:

Tested my new 5800X.
I need to buy some AIO because it goes to 90°C like nothing.
I'm currently learning about undervolting.

Did you peel the sticker from the coolers heatplate before installing it? 😜

Yes, I did peel it off.
Years ago when I first used and if I check now... Oh, my bad! 🤣 🤣

My 6 heat pipes isn't enough, 120mm fans and probably a new case is needed.
It's xmas after all.

Nexxen wrote on 2025-12-25, 13:36:

Yes, I did peel it off. Years ago when I first used and if I check now... Oh, my bad! LOL LOL […]
Show full quote

GigAHerZ wrote on 2025-12-25, 12:47:

Nexxen wrote on 2025-12-25, 10:26:

Tested my new 5800X.
I need to buy some AIO because it goes to 90°C like nothing.
I'm currently learning about undervolting.

Did you peel the sticker from the coolers heatplate before installing it? 😜

Yes, I did peel it off.
Years ago when I first used and if I check now... Oh, my bad! 🤣 🤣

My 6 heat pipes isn't enough, 120mm fans and probably a new case is needed.
It's xmas after all.

It should not be necessary to have a large cooler or an AIO for a 5800X, or any 8-core Ryzen. It is only a 105 watt chip. The temps will spike fairly high due to the small die size and heat concentration, but this is normal and adding a ton of cooling will not really do much. Beyond a certain point the heat can't leave the die quick enough for it to matter how quickly your cooler dissipates heat. Getting the heat away from the die as efficiently as possible is far more important with these chips... though realistically, they run fine in normal workloads even if the reported temps look high.

If you're using decent thermal paste and a cooler capable of dissipating 105 watts it should be sufficient. If you are hitting 90C under normal loads, I would check your thermal paste application first (assuming you were joking about the sticker... 🤣 ). Also, update your system BIOS and make sure the board isn't overvolting or applying PBO without your consent... a lot of them did that.

When I googled it 5800X cinebench temps, this is what came up immediately:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/qusz7k/ … ith_aio_during/

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-12-25, 13:54:

If you're using decent thermal paste and a cooler capable of dissipating 105 watts it should be sufficient. If you are hitting 90C under normal loads, I would check your thermal paste application first (assuming you were joking about the sticker... 🤣 ). Also, update your system BIOS and make sure the board isn't overvolting or applying PBO without your consent... a lot of them did that.

When I googled it 5800X cinebench temps, this is what came up immediately:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/qusz7k/ … ith_aio_during/

Thanks, I have to check PBO and friends.
Well, I need a AIO for my eyes as the h/s I have is rated for 125W (I thought less).

As for Cinebench I'm at 90°C with 14900.

I'll update the bios and set a few values and retest. I'm not going to any hard stuff anyway 😀

I don't have one of those processors, but here's an idea: if the hot spot is very small, the temperature spike easily overwhelms the heat sink if it doesn't have enough mass to absorb that spike and doesn't have time to transfer the heat to the cold spot. It's just an idea. But perhaps a heat sink with a larger mass in contact with the CPU would reduce that sudden rise in temperature, although it would maintain a higher average temperature. As far as I know, 240/280 AIOs have the same pump as 120s, unless I have read/found something to the contrary. The 240/280 AIOs have a very large mass, but if I understand correctly, the pump cannot move enough water volume quickly enough for the radiator to do its job as it should. Heatspreaders already perform this function to a certain extent.
It's just an idea, I don't know if there is anything along these lines.

Hoping wrote on 2025-12-26, 12:00:

I don't have one of those processors, but here's an idea: if the hot spot is very small, the temperature spike easily overwhelms the heat sink if it doesn't have enough mass to absorb that spike and doesn't have time to transfer the heat to the cold spot. It's just an idea. But perhaps a heat sink with a larger mass in contact with the CPU would reduce that sudden rise in temperature, although it would maintain a higher average temperature. As far as I know, 240/280 AIOs have the same pump as 120s, unless I have read/found something to the contrary. The 240/280 AIOs have a very large mass, but if I understand correctly, the pump cannot move enough water volume quickly enough for the radiator to do its job as it should. Heatspreaders already perform this function to a certain extent.
It's just an idea, I don't know if there is anything along these lines.

Ideas are always welcome.
I have to learn more about AIOs and watercooling. For these few days (or weeks) I'll just undervolt it and keep my air h/s.

I don't want and don't need to rush anything as I'm in no urgent situation (maybe increasing HL2 to 2000 FPS 🤣).

Gave my little desk clock / ESP32 lotto miner a better home! 😀

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-12-25, 13:54:

Played with PBO and other values, got 74°C at max with a boost up to 4600MHz. That's the same with all PBO on auto and no limits to the rest. Single core 4800 MHz.
-20 mv on all cores.
C23 + OCCT no errors.
That's something. Yeah, I don't need a AIO asap. 😀

Guides are everywhere, it's great too 😀

For some time now, I have been planning the assembly/restoration of a machine with only one exclusive task: to experiment with AI locally[/i], and therefore, completely in private, 24/7.

My choice, after much research, fell on the restoration and upgrade of a machine I already partially owned with what I was looking for: an HP Z420 v2 workstation, an excellent and solid enterprise machine, equipped in this case with:

• CPU: Xeon E5-2696
• PSU: 600W
• RAM: 32GB DDR3
• GPU: nVidia RTX 3060 12GB GDDR6
• SSD: 2TB

This is what it looked like when the side panel was opened: very solid - note the air ducts and fan over the RAM, the stock HP air cooler (not the liquid model, manufactured by HP itself), the full-length graphics card, and the fans. 92mm in/out of the case, with their mounts:

In addition to the excellent 0.022-micron Ivy Bridge processor for Socket 2011 - despite the 130W of max power consumption - from 12 cores and 24 threads, minimum clock @2.5GHz and max @3.3GHz, 3MB of L2 cache and 30MB of L3, my choice came down to the existing video card, given that when it comes to using AI models it is the power of the GPU and the video memory that are the masters: in this case the pre-installed card is decent, as are the 12GB of VRAM, even if having 16GB would have offered more leeway. In any case, I didn't want quantities of VRAM lower than these levels, without breaking the bank (which I have burned anyway, between this and the updates, etc.).

The ventilation ducts are easily removed:

And here the stock HP heatsink was removed, and the surface of the case was given a good clean. CPU:

Now all that's left to do is be patient and wait for the other components to arrive, so we can update the machine and make it as efficient as possible for the purpose.

Just before the hols, I popped into a thrift and found a Latitude E6420 just sitting on the shelf, was cheap so I had no expectation of it working... but it booted right up on an HP psu, having not come with one. However that was a volt short 18.5 instead of 19.5 so it was refusing to charge the battery, which is discharged but claiming to be okay. It's a little on the worn side, missing it's clitmouse cap, few dings but stoutly together. So I brung that up into "see what it's like" state, rather than full prep and it's alright for a sandycrotch. i5-2520M/8GB and 300ish of spinning rust

So yesterday I hit up the same thift to see if the dell psu or another was lurking unfound, and a good search didn't find it, but it found it's next year sibling, an E6430, same cheap price, same kind of condition. Weird. Well it's got a bigass 9 cell batt, maybe this one is dead and I can steal parts... Heh, boots, well after I set it to UEFI so it could find the boot file it boots. This one got the i5-3440M... and it was same again, run but no charge off HP PSU.

Third time lucky methinks, today hit different thrifts in search for a Dell PSU... found a universal one for cheap, only 65W though, but yes, got both of them charging up now.

Anyways... remember the Elitebook 8640P I got a while back? Yeah I bought an i7-2760QM cpu to go in that, then a bunch of nonsense happened and computer playtime curtailed and it didn't happen yet. Also got 16GB in DDR3 SODIMMs. Bringing that to mind because...

I have had a period of attrition in 2nd tier machines and the workshop beaters, they have been breaking down and win7 installs are no longer supporting browsers capable of doing much online now. The workshop beaters were in horrible states to begin with, taped with makeshift fixes, complete wrecks got running with luck and poor judgement, stuff that came free or for pennies. Turion and Core2. The second tier machines were nicer, but have just aged out for "being on the internet" in other than retro ways now.

So it is quite fortunate to have a sudden cheap bonanza in sandybridge and better, able to run win10, units that will take some upgrades, RAM/SSD and do some donkey work. By amazing coincidence, I picked up a Dell dock that fits them some time ago.

Now then I guess what I am getting around to is the question, which i5-2520 deserves the i7 most? Latitude E6420 or Elitebook 8640P? They both have models in the range that take the quad, so it should work.... and I don't need the lecture about cooling again thanks, not first rodeo, unless one is known worse than the other.

They are both partially rugged, the Elitebook is slightly better cosmetically, but slightly larger. The Dell will dock. I guess really, I am coming down on the side of the Dell unless there is a super good reason why not.

By the way are we allowed to mention the H-word boot CD yet? Latest versions claim to be fully freely distributable software. It was real useful to insert new passwords and take a look at machines before potentially letting virussy trojans into the network or something, and also figure out some hardware details and otherwise recover their installs.

So yeah, trailing edge modern stuff going on here really, windows10 wrangling, gonna be fitting SSDs and all the RAM I can scrape up.

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-12-29, 05:17:

Just before the hols, I popped into a thrift and found a Latitude E6420 just sitting on the shelf, was cheap so I had no expecta […]
Show full quote

Just before the hols, I popped into a thrift and found a Latitude E6420 just sitting on the shelf, was cheap so I had no expectation of it working... but it booted right up on an HP psu, having not come with one. However that was a volt short 18.5 instead of 19.5 so it was refusing to charge the battery, which is discharged but claiming to be okay. It's a little on the worn side, missing it's clitmouse cap, few dings but stoutly together. So I brung that up into "see what it's like" state, rather than full prep and it's alright for a sandycrotch. i5-2520M/8GB and 300ish of spinning rust

So yesterday I hit up the same thift to see if the dell psu or another was lurking unfound, and a good search didn't find it, but it found it's next year sibling, an E6430, same cheap price, same kind of condition. Weird. Well it's got a bigass 9 cell batt, maybe this one is dead and I can steal parts... Heh, boots, well after I set it to UEFI so it could find the boot file it boots. This one got the i5-3440M... and it was same again, run but no charge off HP PSU.

Third time lucky methinks, today hit different thrifts in search for a Dell PSU... found a universal one for cheap, only 65W though, but yes, got both of them charging up now.

Anyways... remember the Elitebook 8640P I got a while back? Yeah I bought an i7-2760QM cpu to go in that, then a bunch of nonsense happened and computer playtime curtailed and it didn't happen yet. Also got 16GB in DDR3 SODIMMs. Bringing that to mind because...

I have had a period of attrition in 2nd tier machines and the workshop beaters, they have been breaking down and win7 installs are no longer supporting browsers capable of doing much online now. The workshop beaters were in horrible states to begin with, taped with makeshift fixes, complete wrecks got running with luck and poor judgement, stuff that came free or for pennies. Turion and Core2. The second tier machines were nicer, but have just aged out for "being on the internet" in other than retro ways now.

So it is quite fortunate to have a sudden cheap bonanza in sandybridge and better, able to run win10, units that will take some upgrades, RAM/SSD and do some donkey work. By amazing coincidence, I picked up a Dell dock that fits them some time ago.

Now then I guess what I am getting around to is the question, which i5-2520 deserves the i7 most? Latitude E6420 or Elitebook 8640P? They both have models in the range that take the quad, so it should work.... and I don't need the lecture about cooling again thanks, not first rodeo, unless one is known worse than the other.

They are both partially rugged, the Elitebook is slightly better cosmetically, but slightly larger. The Dell will dock. I guess really, I am coming down on the side of the Dell unless there is a super good reason why not.

By the way are we allowed to mention the H-word boot CD yet? Latest versions claim to be fully freely distributable software. It was real useful to insert new passwords and take a look at machines before potentially letting virussy trojans into the network or something, and also figure out some hardware details and otherwise recover their installs.

So yeah, trailing edge modern stuff going on here really, windows10 wrangling, gonna be fitting SSDs and all the RAM I can scrape up.

Those are solid machines. I've set up a few from the Sandy Bridge to Haswell generations. The screens on the ones I used were pretty horrid and low-res, but that was really the only downside to them.

I would put the QM in whichever one has the best screen or has any other distinguishing features above the others.

It's funny, reading your post made me realize that my personal laptop (which very very rarely gets used these days) is so old that it's actually a really stout Windows XP system if I wanted to dual-boot it.

That machine is a good story, so I'll take a little stroll down memory lane for a sec...

Being a desktop guy, the first actually usable laptop I ever owned was one that was given to me by a relative in ~2012 because they didn't want it anymore. It was an Acer Aspire (model number seems lost to time) with a 14" screen, a Celeron 420 (single core 1.6Ghz Conroe-L), Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics, GL40 chipset, 2GB of DDR2 and a barely adequate spinning drive running Windows Vista Basic. It was so cheap to upgrade a machine like that (since it was basically the worst of everything) that I had some fun upgrading it to... I think... a Core 2 Duo T8100, 4GB of DDR2, bigger\faster hard drive and even an extended battery. It was a surprisingly useful little machine. If it had a higher res screen and an SSD it would have been totally usable for many many years. It was also hilariously thick and "round"... I really wish I could find a picture of it or figure out what model it was, but I can't find anything like it right now.

At this point I was finally finding uses for a "mobile computer" and decided to look into getting something newer in late 2013. I was waaaay too poor at the time (new family) to afford anything new or high end. But... my wife had an HP HDX18 with a backlit keyboard and a 1080P screen and I knew I wanted both of those features (though it was unlikely to be 18 inches...).

After much searching and deliberating, I decided that the Asus Q500A line of laptops was basically what I wanted. They were only about a year old in December of 2013, but I managed to find one on ebay with a broken screen for right around $200, which was a steal! It had Windows 8, an i5 3210M (35W Ivy Bridge dual core + HT, HD4000), 6GB DDR3-1600 (2+4), a 750GB 5400RPM hard drive, 3-level backlit keyboard (still looks and feels awesome 12 years later), 15.6" 1366x768 screen (broken), lots of black brushed aluminum and very solid construction... definitely a step above what you'd find at wal-mart. That config was $600 retail normally. My main reason for going with this machine was that I absolutely wanted a 1080P screen and the Q500A line also had a higher end config with an i7 and a 1080P screen.

This was a pretty big gamble for me since I had basically no experience tearing deep into modern laptops to do upgrades, but I did some digging and saw that some higher end Thinkpad laptops seemed to use the same connector placement as this Asus, and they used some very very nice AUO panels, so I decided to track one of those down. I found a used AUO B156HW01 V4 1080P panel from a Thinkpad on ebay for $50. I did what seemed like brain surgery and the screen upgrade actually worked! The specs don't look like much now, but this TN panel looks more like a VA or IPS without the downsides of either of those, and the 95% NTSC color is a huge improvement over others I'd seen in 2013. After all these years it is still so vibrant and easy on the eyes and gets sufficiently bright as well.

I now had a fantastic laptop with a better screen than it was ever supposed to have for only $250. I used it that way for a couple years but eventually upgraded it to Windows 10, 8GB DDR3 (4+4) and swapped out the hard drive for a Samsung 840EVO 250GB... then after seeing the news about those being flaky I switched it to a 512GB ADATA SU800 SSD in ~2018. I almost sold it when I found a cheap HP gaming laptop on clearance at Wal-Mart, but I actually ended up selling that instead because it wasn't as nice, even if it was faster.

A year or two ago I was thinking about getting a newer laptop again, but when I realized I could grab a quad core i7 and 16GB of RAM for this one for like $40 total (they were smoking deals...) I decided to go for it.

So, at the end of 2025 it now has an i7 3632QM (35W Quad core with HT), Adata SU800 512GB and 16GB DDR3-1600. It still works as well as it did when I got it, which was 12 years ago this month. It's on only it's second battery, and that is also getting a bit weak, and there is a small flake of something loose inside the LCD panel but it isn't much of a bother and it's been there for probably 7-8 years now. I think the fan runs a bit more now with the quad core despite them both being 35W TDP, but it's a bit hard to tell because I just don't use it that much and it has to install Windows updates almost every time I do something on it. If it seems too noisy I might try one of the new fangled phase change TIM sheets I picked up recently to see if that helps.

Anyway, maybe I'll try dual booting XP with it some time. It could be pretty interesting, and I think the HD4000 graphics running along side this CPU would probably manage 15,000-20,000 in 3Dmark 2001SE, which is plenty for some decent XP gaming on a 60Hz display.

EDIT: After arguing with Google's stupid AI chat bot for 10 minutes I finally was able to get it to stop gaslighting me on whether my orignal Acer laptop even existed. It suddenly came up with the Acer Aspire 4330 series, which is exactly what I had been describing the whole time. I'm about 90% sure that's what I had. Strange though... most of the search results are from outside the US. Who knows where this thing originally came from. 😅

Man, I'm pretty happy about this.

A few months ago I picked up a scrap lot that contained some interesting old parts but also had an ASRock B560M-C microATX board. Upon inspection I noticed that the board had a bent pin in the socket. I did my best to straighten it out and figured I'd hang onto it until I got a suitable 10th or 11th Gen Intel processor to test it with.

A month or so ago I got some SFF Dell workstations from a friend that does e-waste collection. Some were so new they had Intel 10th and 12th Gen i5 processors. Among them was at least one equipped with an i5 10505, which is a really solid processor still... and it would work in that ASRock board! Of course, I'm taking a CPU out of a working SFF PC to put into a loose board... but really, around here people aren't going to pay much more for a refurbished 10th gen desktop vs a refurbished 8th Gen, so I figured it'd be worth rolling the dice to see if I could start building a budget gaming PC with this stuff.

I had a spare stick of DDR4 to test it with and upon powering it on, it was quite flaky and didn't want to do much. At that point I realized that this stupid board doesn't have a CMOS battery holder. It just has a tiny little plug to accomodate one of those laptop-style batteries with a tiny red+black wire to connect to the board. So, it was trying to do memory training and everything else without a CMOS battery. Bleh!

So, I spent way too long trying to figure out which one has the correct plug and polarity for this board (ended up with these), and they arrived today. Thankfully, the plug fits and the polarity is correct!

Also today, I received a scrap lot I purchased to get some old parts and in it was one 16GB kit of DDR4-3000, which is worth waaaay more than it was a few months ago! So, now I had a board, a CPU and a proper RAM kit to be able to test it all out.

It was still flaky and the diagnostic LEDs cycled a lot before coming on, but it did come to life! The board works! After some messing around with Ventoy I was able to get it booting into Hirens BootCD PE where I ran my usual Windows-based KarHu RAMTest. To my amazement, it made it through a full pass with no errors! One person threw away a whole working 10th gen workstation, another threw away a working 10th gen board and right now during a DRAM shortage someone threw away a working 16GB kit of DDR4.

I then updated the BIOS and that actually fixed the funky cycling at startup... it now boots instantly and just works! I can't do much on it because I don't have a proper cooler that fits on this board, but the setup in this picture actually worked totally fine and kept the CPU cool enough to do all of those things without getting too hot.

🤣🤣🤣

... though the heatsink was finally getting decently warm after a full pass of RAMTest. I'm sure it wouldn't have liked running for 3-4 passes like that. Crazy thing is, this 25-30 year old heatsink was just sitting on the CPU with a slathering of Arctic Alumina (a step above basic white paste), and the noisy old fan was being controlled (via voltage, not PWM) by the motherboard without me having to mess with a single setting.

(Temps hung out at around 35C max in the BIOS with that tiny little cooler just sitting loosely on the CPU.)

Just need to figure out what to do with this setup now. I will give it some time to determine if anyone I know needs a gaming PC, because whoever it is going to will determine if it is getting a sleek and discreet case + cooler or something flashy with all the AreGeeBeezes. My daughter doesn't have a desktop of her own, but she's quite content with the MSI laptop I snagged on clearance at walmart for $200 a few years ago (i7 10750H, GTX 1660 Ti 6GB, 120Hz screen, upgraded to 16GB DDR4-2933 and a 1TB SKHynix P31 Gold), so I don't think this would make sense for her.

Anyway... I needed this today. I had a really crappy start to the day and this was a good way to wrap it up. As was repairing and successfully testing a rare first-gen 3D accelerator that was included in today's scrap lot. 😁

Today reinstalling the o.s. into a Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB) with a NVME 128GB PCI-E main disk cause last new linux distro version released having better Mesa OpenGL version and softwares. It actually works quite well as a desktop replacement with most thing I'd expect from an everyday office machine fast enough as a (very) low end recent x64 machine. While not a fan of these modern GUI accelerated version with higher latency times, in OpenGL web apps it clearly is smoother at the cost of an higher latency UI for the o.s.

At the same time I bought one of the fastest Micro SD available for the Raspberry Pi 4 version not having NVME PCI-EX native connection and installing the same o.s. into that. As known the difference is mostly in the SoC complexity and speed, the slower with a Cortex A72 (1x1MB-L2) quad core @ 1,8Ghz versus the Cortex A76 (4x512Kb L2 + 1x2MB L3) @ 2,4Ghz both 8GB DDR4L RAM. Of course the Rpi5 NVME PCI-EX disk does all the difference of the world in a real o.s. usage but both the Cortex cpus does what they can even if of course the Rpi5 is really a next generation config and can really be defined as a computer replacement as much as a low end PC is needed for.

The NVME disk for the Rpi5 is a Kingston generic NVME PCI-EX Gen3 2230 board running at Gen2 speed for compatibility reason and around 400MB/s read/write speed, while the fastest MicroSD gives like 1/10 of that speed of course. As fastest one MicroSD (not SD Express tech, it is not compatible unfortunately) for the Rpi4 instead I went for a Lexar Silver Plus 256GB A2 card. I wasn't expecting it to be faster than the expensive Samsung Pro Ultimate cards but indeed it is.

So, Amazon is now starting to force their Rufus AI chatbot on all search result pages. It automatically pops out on the left side of the screen and pushes your search results off to the right into a smaller condensed area. Very annoying, and it's not even proving useful information, just a lot of spam.

After a lot of searching and speaking to Amazon customer service, there is no way to "officially" disable this "feature".

However...

1. This only happens when your logged into Amazon.

I ran across a workaround from UBlock Origin, a tool I already use in my browser (Firefox). They came up with a custom rule to effectively block Rufus while logged in on Amazon, and so far, it works amazingly well!

Sharing it just in case anyone is interested and gets annoyed by it as much as I, do. 😀

1! prevent "rufus" from showing its nose (unless if in "floating" mode)
2amazon.com##body.rufus-docked-left:remove-class(rufus-docked-left)
3amazon.com##body.rufus-docked-right:remove-class(rufus-docked-right)
4amazon.com##body:is(.rufus-docked-left, .rufus-docked-right):remove-attr(style)
5amazon.com###nav-flyout-rufus:not([data-state="expanded"])
6! hide "rufus" button
7amazon.com##button#nav-rufus-disco
8! 20251220 clear all rufus settings
9! use this one to attempt to completely nuke "rufus" in case you still see an open+close effect
10! (remove the  !  in front of the filter)
11! amazon.com##+js(set-session-storage-item, /rufus/, $remove$)

Getting real tired of AI being forced on us. Even more so when it's unhelpful or done in an overly annoying way. Amazon has already received a torrent of complaints, so maybe they'll address it in the future, but for now, if it happens to you, this workaround is effective.

The last time I tried to buy anything from Amazon was in October, and I had to turn off uBlock Origin to get past the payment page.

Today, my computers keep popping up "limited connectivity" messages, even though I still have Internet access.

Also, I learned that my monitor's color gamut is 99% sRGB. I thought this was some boring business monitor.

Not sure if this falls under retro or modern:

I've been mucking around with an Athlon 64X2 6400+ and SLI 7950GTs and noticed the chipset (heatsink) and VRMs get uncomfortably warm under load.

With help of the 3D printer, I've added a 40mm fan to the chipset and a small heatsink to the VRMs (The board has unused push-clip holes which made this easier). It's the only heatsink I had that would fit such a narrow space.

This in conjunction with a large downdraft CPU cooler has made me a lot less nervous about the longevity of this board.

Caps replaced?
Had a socket a that had heat discolouration around the vrm and was stupid hot.
Replaced caps and it was cool.
You might be treating symptoms.

myne wrote on 2026-01-03, 04:48:

Caps replaced? Had a socket a that had heat discolouration around the vrm and was stupid hot. Replaced caps and it was cool. You […]
Show full quote

Caps replaced?
Had a socket a that had heat discolouration around the vrm and was stupid hot.
Replaced caps and it was cool.
You might be treating symptoms.

The IR thermometer I have showed 95C on the bare VRMs under Prime95 small FFT load with minimal airflow. This is what prompted me to make the changes.

I'm not sure how accurate the readings are or if 95C is "normal" for this board with this CPU.

The cap replacement is good advice, I will look into it, Cheers.

https://www.gigabyte.com/bz/Motherboard/GA-M57SLI-S4-rev-20

Bear "evidence" I could find in 5 mins - and it's really only suggestive.

But... You don't normally boast about your 3+1 vrm if it's shit.

Any other hot components stand out? Especially caps.
Starting from cold may highlight the faster ones better.

Caps usually fail short if you don't know.

myne wrote on 2026-01-03, 05:15:

https://www.gigabyte.com/bz/Motherboard/GA-M57SLI-S4-rev-20 […]
Show full quote

https://www.gigabyte.com/bz/Motherboard/GA-M57SLI-S4-rev-20

Bear "evidence" I could find in 5 mins - and it's really only suggestive.

But... You don't normally boast about your 3+1 vrm if it's shit.

Any other hot components stand out? Especially caps.
Starting from cold may highlight the faster ones better.

Caps usually fail short if you don't know.

Nothing else on the board feels uncomfortably warm to me. Just the VRM and Chipset heatsinks if they don't have some air flowing over them.

I also should mention that even without the VRM heatsink, some direct airflow on the area will drop the VRM temps into the 60s.