DescentBB

I recently got one of those fan/temp monitoring device that fit in the drive bay, and it came with 4 of those thermal sensors, I was wonder the best way to mount one so I can take CPU temperature readings.

The heat sink is a volcano 7+

from what I've seen, the prefered place to mount it is under the CPU. I have a volcano 9 with temperature controlled fan speed, and the picture on the box shows the sensor taped to the bottom of the CPU with the wire running between the pins. I haven't done this, though, as i use the adjustable fan speed rather than temperature controlled fan speed.

Flip - you and I have same heat sink. And I have my Vantec Nexus panel thermosensor mounted right on the heatsink, about 3mm away from where the die is clamped to the heatsink. I tried different locations for it.

No one really cares what temperature the actual CPU is - what's more important is how hot the Heatsink is! Bare with me here.... The measure of how well you mounted the CPU's Heatsink is the temperature differential between the Core temperature and the Heatsink temperature.

The BIOS always reports the correct core temperature, and so you can check to see how well you did. My heatsink is almost constantly 8 C cooler than the BIOS reports the CPU temp as. This is good - because an all-copper heatsink (Like the Volcano 7) has a high thermal index which means the efficiency of your install is reflected by the temperature diff.

I'm very happy with 8 C diff - as remounting the CPU before Xmas resulted in a 14 degree difference, which basically told me I'd shagged the CPU mounting operation.

Remounting it properly, after cleaning it all with IPA and using Arctis Silver again fixed the problem and lowered the diff to that figure of 8C again.

Be VERY careful when you place the sensor on the heatsink. Make absolutely sure it does NOT get between the CPU die and the heatsink. That will result in a nasty disaster if things go bad.

Getting it close to the core, while leaving enough space to smear a tiny amount of thermal goop over the die-area (and then taking ALL of it off prior to CPU mounting!) can be tricky. And that tape won't survive a single round of IPS tidy up either.

I think you'd have real trouble mounting it under the CPU. How would you get the wire-trace out? The CPU wouldn't sit flat in the socket - and you'd break something if your heatsink retainer is powerful.

Good luck!

I stuck the sensor between the vanes on the V7+, near the bottom. works well.

On an aside, I have an A7N8X mobo, and I was wondering if this had a bios-based boot menu, and if so, how would I go getting to it.

What exactly do you mean by a bios based menu? I've got an A7N8X

I should've said just a boot menu. you press a button during post, and it takes to a menu where you can select which device to boot from.

I havent come accros one yet. I'd be intrested though...

I believe you still have to go into BIOS setup and choose the boot device order from there. That's pretty much the story on ASUS boards.

On my Asus, you can press F8 to choose a boot device.

My CLSC2 used ESC to access the boot menu. I've read of other ASUS boards using other keys. I've also read in my searches that other NF2 boards have this feature.

Seems to absent on the A7N8X models.