New Toys! (After an Accident with Thermal Paste)

[Zoot]

Some backstory: Over the Xmas I made the n00b error (despite building PCs for the better part of ten years now) of putting way too much thermal paste on my A4-5300 APU in my HTPC, so much so it seeped down underneath the APU and obviously shorted two pins together. The end result was a bricked motherboard and APU.

On the bright side of things, the board (MSi FM2-A55M-E33) was a serious POS. No matter what I did, it would always spin the CPU fan at 100%, I was just inching for an opportunity to replace it. Although I did only pay €40 for it.

Anyway, these have arrived yesterday evening.

Moral of the story - don't let this happen to you. :crazy:

This APU is pretty low end but it'll do fine for a HTPC, but on the other hand I'm really impressed by this board, it's my 1st taste of a miniITX board. It's nice to actually have a decent board this time, it'll be the 1st and last time I skimp on a motherboard.

The next additions to this setup later in the year is the top-end Kaveri A10-7850k and a proper miniITX case to make a nice little SteamBox.

Hopefully AMD will have their Linux drivers sorted by then.

 

[vorticalbox]

Moral of the story - don't let this happen to you. :crazy:

or use none conductive paste....

glad it was only a lower end cpu

 

[tinytomlogan]

And that children is why we use non conductive thermal paste.

 

[SieB]

Nice, Kaveri is not far away either so at least you are good to go as soon as you can buy a 7850k

 

[Wraith]

And that children is why we use non conductive thermal paste.

And this is why we love the Guv! :lol:

Zoot which TIM were you using? After many years of TIM application I found my perfect paste to be Shin Etsu MicroSI, me and a buddy a few years back for S#!ts & giggles tried all sorts of alternatives on a old P4 we had lying around i.e Toothpaste, Marmite, Play doh... ect we had fun even had surprising results with some but at the end of the day as Tom and Vorticalbox stated always use non conductive paste.

 

[Zoot]

And this is why we love the Guv! :lol:

Zoot which TIM were you using? After many years of TIM application I found my perfect paste to be Shin Etsu MicroSI, me and a buddy a few years back for S#!ts & giggles tried all sorts of alternatives on a old P4 we had lying around i.e Toothpaste, Marmite, Play doh... ect we had fun even had surprising results with some but at the end of the day as Tom and Vorticalbox stated always use non conductive paste.

I used the stuff Cooler Master included with the Hyper Evo 212 that I have on my FX-8350, I know now that it actually is conductive. :lol:
I have OCZ stuff that I got like 4 years ago on everything else, can't even remember the name.

And yeah, I remember Hardware Secrets (I think) did a round-up of rather interesting options for thermal paste, I think they found toothpaste and mayonaise to be the best. Makes you wonder what those the manufacturers are putting into them. ^_^

 

[RamboOC]

i had water spill on my motherboard, water went under the socket while the pc was on. i had some artifacting, bsods or sometimes the pc would not boot for a while but after it dried out it was all fine again. i guess I was lucky. that pc was running fx-4100.

 

[Zoot]

glad it was only a lower end cpu

Both these APUs are pretty low end. They compete with Intel's Celerons, the only advantage over the Celerons they have is the IGP. Although at least this one is overclockable, I can down-clock it if I need, but the stock cooler on it at the moment is nice and quiet.

i had water spill on my motherboard, water went under the socket while the pc was on. i had some artifacting, bsods or sometimes the pc would not boot for a while but after it dried out it was all fine again. i guess I was lucky. that pc was running fx-4100.

You were lucky indeed! Far worse could have happened.

Potential leeks are one of the reasons I've been leery about water-cooling. Although to be fair lazyness and the ability to swap in and out parts easily is more the reason in my case.

 

[RamboOC]

Both these APUs are pretty low end. They compete with Intel's Celerons, the only advantage over the Celerons they have is the IGP. Although at least this one is overclockable, I can down-clock it if I need, but the stock cooler on it at the moment is nice and quiet.


One of the reasons I've been leery about water-cooling. Although to be fair lazyness and the ability to swap in and out parts easily is why I've always stayed away from it.

I was using home made dyodrant cooling
Did similar thing with the i5-760 in my sig. right now i dont have a pc, i am using a laptop that is not mine that i am supposed to repair

 

[RamboOC]

right now i am building a cheap apu system. i already have a amd a6-6400k, gigabyte gtx 570 super overclock, atec 500w 80+bronze psu and 8 gigs of 1333mhz ddr3 ram running at loose timings. in few days i want to buy a motherboard. MSi FM2-A55M-E33 is one of the options. is it really that bad?

 

[Zoot]

right now i am building a cheap apu system. i already have a amd a6-6400k, gigabyte gtx 570 super overclock, atec 500w 80+bronze psu and 8 gigs of 1333mhz ddr3 ram running at loose timings. in few days i want to buy a motherboard. MSi FM2-A55M-E33 is one of the options. is it really that bad?

Well it was stable, that I can't fault it on. But that CPU fan issue was a deal-breaker for me, since it was going into a HTPC. I didn't want that blowing at full speed all the time, I got around it using a cooler that allowed external adjusting of the fan speed.

Another thing is that board has no overclocking options at all, but then again it has no heatsink on the VRMs so you're not going to be overclocking anyway. I'd advise you to get a board with the A75 chipset at the very least, but with Kaveri about to launch, you may as well get an FM2+ board. ^_^

 

[RamboOC]

Well it was stable, that I can't fault it on. But that CPU fan issue was a deal-breaker for me, since it was going into a HTPC. I didn't want that blowing at full speed all the time, I got around it using a cooler that allowed external adjusting of the fan speed.

Another thing is that board has no overclocking options at all, but then again it has no heatsink on the VRMs so you're not going to be overclocking anyway. I'd advise you to get a board with the A75 chipset at the very least, but with Kaveri about to launch, you may as well get an FM2+ board. ^_^

i have alaska nero cpu cooler. the 120mm fan is silent even if its running at full speed so that would not be a problem. have you had the latest bios?
maybe the full fan speed was caused by the thermal paste that shorted the cpu pins. did the temps look right?

no overclocking options? thats a shame. i avoid all boards with no overclocking options. what power phase does it have?

I'd advise you to get a board with the A75 chipset

but a75 chipset was only included with fm1 motherboards, and my a6-6400k only supports fm2

 

[Zoot]

i have alaska nero cpu cooler. the 120mm fan is silent even if its running at full speed so that would not be a problem. have you had the latest bios?
maybe the full fan speed was caused by the thermal paste that shorted the cpu pins. did the temps look right?

no overclocking options? thats a shame. i avoid all boards with no overclocking options. what power phase does it have?

I think it only had 4/5 power phases, there weren't many chokes or caps around the APU socket.

Yep, I had the latest BIOS and the APU itself ran quite cool, it wasn't exactly a power hungry chip in the 1st place, and still the fan persisted at 100%.

For the AMD APUs I think you really need to go for a board with the A85X or A88X chipset to get proper overclocking support. This Gigabyte board is great (typing on it now), there's a whole slew of overclocking options among many other features, including far greater control over the CPU fan speed. ^_^

 

[barnsley]

As long as you don't run the cpu if you get conductive thermal paste on it you'll be fine ^_^

With APUs, especially if you want to overclock you should buy the most expensive one you can. If you know you won't use the onboard gpu, just get the ones without it (the Athlons). They do really well and you get way more juice for the price.

 

[Zoot]

Yeah I kind of see this A6-6400k as a stop-gap until I get something like the A10-7850k.

It was pretty cheap anyway, no powerhouse but fine for a HTPC.

 

[Zoot]

Here's the end result, the cable management is slightly horrific at the minute, but it'll do until I get around to getting a proper HTPC mini-ITX case.

This case was only something like €30 too. ^_^

 

[RamboOC]

I ended up buying Asus a55bm-we over MSi FM2-A55M-E33 mainly because it supports fm2+ cpus. Some of its other advantages of it is that it has pcie3, digi+vrm and it supports over clocking and higher ram clocks and a sexy uefi

 

[Zoot]

I think you only get PCIe 3.0 if you use one of the new Kaveri APUs. I know I don't have PCIe 3.0 with my A6-6400k on this Gigabyte board.

Nonetheless, I'd be interested to see how you get on with that board given my rather negaative experience with the MSi board.

 

[RamboOC]

Once I get the Asus board I will do some over clocking. I will post updates here. Its going to be tough with 3+1 power phase and a55 chip set but I will push the clock to the limit. I'm hoping to achieve 4.3ghz stabe and 5ghz unstable for validation purpuses.
I like amd but what annoys me is that newer amd CPUs have very low ipc as well as shared resources and half modules. I would not call the amd a6-6400k a dual core. Its more like a single core with hyperthreading

 

[Zoot]

Yeah the module-design was quite new, part of the problem was Windows; it had a lot of issues with it when it 1st came out. Several patches and driver updates later, and the situation is fine now.

All you have to do is look at Linux benchmarks as an example; the FX-8350 for instance is actually able to hang with the i7-3770k, giving it quite the run for its high price premium. This isn't something that happens in Windows. ^_^

The Dual-Core APUs are pretty low end. Although, the APUs really come into their own when you look at the higher end quad cores like the A10-6700 or A10-6800k, given their great IGP. So-much-so they've kind of made the Intel i3's completely irrelevant IMO.