H50 cooling issues with X3470

I have a Gigabyte P55A-UD3 with a recently-purchased X3470 and just put on a H50 I had sitting in the closet for a year.

My temps have been quite high, easily reaching ~80-85C during Prime95. I'm not sure if it was the cooler or the thermal paste, so I took it back apart, wiped off the existing paste, and put on a dab of Arctic Silver 5. The temps we worse (~85-90C).

..which leads me to the cooler. I checked on quite a few forums and sites, and noticed there were 2 designs of the H50. One with a spring-screw design, and the clip one (which I have).

I'm not sure if it's supposed to run that hot, but I've never had a processor get THAT hot.

First, are you overclocking your CPU? If so, the H50 may simply be unable to handle the overclock.

Second, when you switched thermal compounds, did you clean the old compound off using 90% or more alchohol, or perhaps Arctic 1&2 or some other non-residue cleaning agent? If not, then the residue from the old compound will create a thermal barrier that will prevent the new compound from efficiently transferring heat from the CPU to the H50 pump.

Third, AC5 is by far the least efficient compound to use. It takes 200 (yes, that is two-hundred) hours of off&on usage to cure (that is to say, perform several power-off cycles during the cure time). This is really quite excessive for a modern thermal compound, as most newer compounds have between 15 minutes and 2 hours of cure time. Before it's properly cured, AC5 will perform much worse than the original compound preapplied on the H50.

Modern processors can easily achieve 90C or more when running nearly 100% on all cores (as would be the case using Prime95), especially when using a lesser cooler like the H50. The H50 is a very good, reliable cooler, but it may be insufficient for an overclocking situation or for some higher-end processors.

I'd suggest you buy Arctic Cooling MX4.

Also make sure it's tightened properly, as my H80i gave me 90 degree in Celsius too when I ran Intel Burn Test. Added another 1/2 turn of the screw for each of them, and suddenly it doesn't exceed 60*C :)

I use ac5 with no problems, before and after cure temps are not that far apart.

make sure you mounted the bracket properly and that the pump is securely mounted to the cpu.