I was running my Falcon at 75% fanspeed. My current Opus is running 75% aswell also I did the Xclamp and thermal paste change. MS uses shit thermal paste
Wrong. Their thermal paste is excellent. It's just that it's not suitable to be re-applied. If you remove the heatsink you need to replace it. It only "spreads" over the surface when hot so re-applying it would involve heating it with hot air before pressing it onto the cpu/gpu die(s). Something like Artic Silver is at grease consistency even when cold so it's easier to apply.
I'm preety sure that when I replaced the thermal paste even without xclamping on one of my friend jtags. It ran almost 4-5C cooler. Temps from XeXMenu 1.1
is running at 100% bad for the fans? j/w cus my Xenons are always 100% but if the fans die i dont want to open up to replace.
How old was the system ? And is it possible that it's heatsink had been removed ? If it's been removed you need to replace the thermal paste with new anyway. You blowing the fans is the least of your problems I'm sure. Crank it up and don't worry about the fans, they're made for and rated to run at that voltage.
Worst case is your bearings will crap out and the fans will be loud as hell. But the 360 fans are good quality, not like the shitty fans you will find in pc power supplies...
My newest Kit is a Kit with Prototype Zephyr Mainboard, i had change the thermal paste (Artic Silver 5) and i let it runs on 70%.;-)
Zephyr still have 90nm GPU so yes, it's as bad as the Xenon regarding thermal issues. I think Falcon GPU is like 80nm but it's still bad and fails way too often. (But not as bad as it's with the Xenon/Zephyr units)...
I have 2005 Kits here...i haven´t a RROD or something. Why i shouldn´t buy a nicely Kit with Prototype Zephyr-Mainboard? It´s runs very cool and works... POINT! ;-) I let it run on 70% because Dev Kits costs enough money
Since I don't really mind the sound all that much, I've got a Jasper running at 100% fan speed. Might be overkill, but better safe than sorry IMO <__< -Doom
