Does over cooling improve performance??

[Gary R.]

An aquiantance of mine that works at a local Ciruit City store has suggested to me he had experinced a noticeable improvement in his games' performance when he greatly increased the airflow in his PC.  I am bouncing this off of you guys to see if anyone else had any similar experience of improved performance by upgrading to higher flowing and extra fans.  Any opinions?

[Delta_]

I had an improvement of 150 in 3DMark01 when i upgraded my CPU cooler.  In practice it works.

[Gary R.]

An "improvement of 150 in 3DMark01"

[FridayChild]

This greatly surprises me. A PROPER cooling prolongs the life of the CPU (it would by far outlive its practical usefulness anyway!) and increases overall system stability. OVER-cooling is obviously a waste of volts, money, and silence.
I don't understand why a CPU should perform faster if cooled more, unless of course it was not properly cooled before and thus was performing erraticaly.

[Delta_]

3DMark01 is a benchmark program, 150 Marks does not calculate to too much bearing in mind i get 12k score.  150 Marks would not give me a notable performance increase in FS9 not even 1FPS.  

http://www.futuremark.com/download/?3dmark2001.shtml

My CPU with the original AMD heatsink was well within its temperature range, it was at 45C.  With the new heatsink it was reduced to 40C.  I changed to a silent heatsink, fan.

I would only upgrade the HSF if your CPU is too hot and/or the current HSF is too noisy.

[the_autopilot]

A cooler CPU does perform better. However, the performence increase is only marginal and generally unnoticable in daily use. Not even I saw a noticable increase with my vapochill.

However, if you have enough cooling and want to make use of it. Overclock and there will be a performence difference. A noticiable one.

[Gary R.]

My cpu temp typically fluctuates between 50 and 55 C.  The limit setting is 60c and I am running it clocked up a bit already.  I also have my 6600 clocked up.  So, if other amd boards are running in the mid 40's normally than perhaps I am running a tad on the warm side.  I might just get a higher flowing cpu fan and perhaps one of those mega blowing cyclone style slot fans to help out the vid card as well.  It doesn't help any that since fall when the old hot water circulators started pumping again that my cpu happens to be very close to a radiator.  In summer I had the A/C in this room running full blow most of the time and I also was able to have the system clocked even higher then to.

[Saratoga]

little late for a reply my comps been down a while... the easiest way to get more air to the computer is simply to rip all the cover cases off. Everything in mine is stripped. The side shells, the covers to the CD burners and drives, the power supply. The reason cooling helps is it lets your computer use less power for the fans to cool it and more power where you want it.

[JBaymore]

Computers use regulated power supplies.  That "regulated" term means that the voltage is held within a certain pass band that is determined at the design stage.... plus or minus a small amount centered around the nominal value.

Cheaper power supplies can have worse voltage regulation than more expensive ones......due to cheap design and cheap low tolerance parts.  So changes in load on the overall supply will possibly affect the regulation performance of the cheaper power supplies more than the more expensive ones.

If the CPU core voltage is typically running a tad lower than it is supposed to be to start with, AND the cooling fans are drawing a lot of power trying to keep up with cooling in a poorly vented case........ then decreasing the cooling load on the fan part of the power supply MIGHT cause the core voltage portion of the supply to go up a little.  This voltage increase would give a VERY marginal increase in CPU performance.

best,

.....................john

[Saratoga]

eh I tried...that's why I didn't major in computer science.