Thread: Cooling issues

So the new computer I built allows me a small gateway into gaming.

I got an A10-5800k with an ASRock A85x Extreme6 motherboard. From the research I have done, ASRock motherboards have PWM problems, and Trinity CPU's come overvolted. This has produced some confusing results for me.

At idle, with a Cooler Master Hyper tx3 with the perfect application of thermal compound, I get temps around 55C. At full GPU load, the highest I've seen is 78C.

The two problems I face are: the tx3 doesn't cover all of the FM2 chip's surface, and the motherboard refuses to change the CPU fan speed according to temperature.

The latter problem I hear can be fixed with 3rd party software, but I don't know if the former is the real problem. If you guys have any input/advice, I'd appreciate it very much.

Sent from my HTC One X using Tapatalk 2

Ok, for posterity's sake, I'll share my discoveries:

The APU's are strange in that any temperature readings taken from the die are going to be wrong. Both the BIOS and the tuning utility provided by ASRock use the cpu socket's temperature, which is the correct temperature. I checked the surface of the A10 chip and my cooler, and there was a blank spot devoid of paste about 15% of the surface area. I've corrected that, and I now idle at the correct temperature of 35C. So far, at max GPU load, the highest temperature it will get is 55C. I haven't done a Prime95 test to stress the CPU, but that will be my next test. After that, it seems like this APU has a lot of overclocking left in it.

The fan PWM that ASRock uses is strange, but it does in fact work, it just takes a few second for it to realize what's going on and up the fan speed.

It's both a pain and kind of fun messing with the A10. I don't think anyone here has messed with APU builds, and I'm going on very limited information because most overclockers are interested in Intel CPUs.

So far, I've figured out how to give the GPU 2560MB (2048MB + 512MB onboard) DDR3 RAM by sharing some of my system RAM. That alone has so far almost doubled the GPU's performance. I'm in the process of testing overclocks, but so far any overclock I attempt outside of the base 4.0/4.2GHz causes the CPU temp to rise uncontrollably...

My kids both have A10 builds. They aren't overclocking and I used the stock AMD coolers, which idle near 40C and peak in the 60's when gaming.

It's interesting that the GPU is the bottleneck of the APU, though that shouldn't be too surprising. I have a stable overclock at 4.6GHz that idles at 37C and tops out at 60C when the GPU (Overclocked by 44MHz) is maxed. I'm willing to take temperatures up to 70C before worrying about temperature, so I guess it's time to find stable GPU overclocks.