insanely low thermal cut or problem with my system?

[morph166955]

So my new system is either hard shutting down or rebooting when either cpu gets above 62C. thats 143F degrees...is it just me or does that seem a little low for hard thermal cut to kick in on a system? ive got 3x 80mm fans blowing directly on the cpu's plus the two fans on their heatsyncs, zalman thermal grease on both chips (installed last night after this became really annoying), plus a 60mm exhaust fan and one of those fans that sits in the card bays sucking air out that way. when the system is hovering as high as 60C its fine but once i hit the dreaded 62C its good bye broadway. why on earth would the thermal limit be that low? i thought these chips were good to like 80C or something like that. anyone got any insights on this for me? the systems specs are asus dsbf-d12 w/ 2x xeon x5355 quad cores (2.66ghz per core) and 4gig FB-DIMM. thanks in advance!

[foxyshadis]

According to the Xeon X5300 specs, the maximum case temp (case meaning the cpu heat spreader) should be 63C under normal circumstances or 70C under heavy thermal throttling. The interior Tjunction (internal) of the chip can be 20-40C hotter, hopefully your shutdown isn't using that.

Anyway, emergency shutdown temps are either in the bios, depending on the model (most gamer and some server boards let you change that), or in certain monitoring tools like motherboard monitor. If it is a bios-initiated cutoff and it's not exposed, you might have to go to the board manufacturer.

[morph166955]

yea i was reading about all that in the intel spec pdf for the 5300 series with the two thermal profiles for the x5300 series. i can understand slowing down the cpu at that heat to prevent burn out but a full thermal shutdown seems a little extreme. I've been pondering that its actually a program/daemon called cpuspeed that my os has been running in the background trying to make changes that the cpu/bios are already handling and causing some type of conflict that the system is dieing from. ive disabled it for now to see what happens ill know once i get the system pegged and it hits that temp again if its going to whine at me or not.

I also learned that as of right now the linux kernel doesnt enjoy the EIST part of my chip. instead of upping each core from 2.00 to 2.66 when its under load it only ups the first core on each processor, the others remain low as far as i can tell. a few runs on x264 proves this as my fps drops even though my cpu usage is higher with EIST on.

I'm tempted to also say that my cause could be the "Thermal Management 2" system that the x5300's have which the kernel is freaking out from. If the above fixes dont work I may swap back to TM1 to see if that helps. Thanks!

[DaChew]

sounds like you need a new case with adequate fans,
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129021

look at the size and number of these fans

60-80mm fans went out years ago

http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=573&name=Case-Fans

cfm is critical, don't have your case where air can't circulate, all you will be doing is sucking hot air back in

a way to test is remove the side of the case and direct a small room fan towards the open case, monitor temps

Temperatures:
Motherboard 29 °C (84 °F)
CPU 34 °C (93 °F)
GPU 38 °C (100 °F)
GPU Ambient 34 °C (93 °F)
DW CDW63G0-D00NF0A 40 °C (104 °F)
Seagate ST3250823AS 43 °C (109 °F)

coasting with a room temp of 70F

[morph166955]

ok...this system is...3 weeks old? the case that its in is a high end server rack case that i need because of the eps12v power supply and a few other parts. im running 2x quad core xeons pegged. they generate ALOT of heat. I'm 99% sure its cause this place is WAY to hot and the air getting into the case is too warm to do any good. when the place is cool @ night the system runs fine, I just want it to not just shut off on me when its under load like it is now thats all because its 1 degree over for a second.

[DaChew]

I had a scenario like yours where I couldn't keep an area cool,
I used the room fan trick and tried to get my work done before
everything started frying the computers

With pegged double quad cores nothing should take that long

when you redline a cpu(62-63) don't expect it to last more than a few weeks

that's why it's shutting down before you burn up mucho dinero cpu's/cores

the old P4's and amd xp's ran hotter, I hated them