Unhappy with my Thermaltake Blue Orb II

I think that part of the reason for the high temp is my motherboard and CoreTemp giving erroneous readings. Idle temps are 15 C lower in the bios than what is read using CoreTemp.

I have tried reseating my heatsink already, and both the CPU and heatsink have been lapped.

Maybe I should just save up for liquid cooling? Let me know what you think.

~87*C?
Reseat? Did you apply your TIM correctly?

I would quickly downclock your CPU. 87C is waaay too hot. The performance gain will be high from TT blue orb to the S1283. But please, downclock your CPU. I'd hate to see a perfectly good Q6600 fry

Lower those clocks! The performance between the two will definitely be significant, for now though, reseat it and make sure you applied TIM correctly, as has already been said.
What are you ambient temps/case temps, do you have good ventilation?

ambient is ~20. Im not sure about the ventilation of the wavemaster case. Its got 4 x 80mm fans. I do have the side panel off so the heatsink should be getting ample of air.

you bought thermalcrap, what can I say?

lol this was when I had a lanbox lite, and that was pretty much the only heatsink that could fit in the case with its height restriction.

Those coolers, aren't really sufficient enough to cool a quad, but I understand your restrictions, I myself would have bought a Zalman in that case, but I'd shoot for a tower cooler first.

Well it IS blue so that MUST at least effect cooling performance.
You can always try lapping it....

Ive already lapped both the CPU and the heatsink.

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=30012&promoid=1019

Are there any other good CPU heatsinks for around that price range?

Do you think that my case is a huge contributing factor to the high temps? I know that the wavemaster is an older case and probably cant compare to the airflow of the newer cases, but is it really that bad?

So I tried downclocking my cpu to 3.2Ghz with 1.30V core. From the looks of it, temps are pretty much the same. shouldnt a 0.1V drop in voltage at least register a significant drop in temp?

Actually, I guess the 0.1V drop in Vcore did make a difference in load temps. They are now ~77 C. Still weird that they made no difference whatsoever in idle temps.

I found the OCZ Vendetta 2 for a similar price. Which one is better, the Xiggie or the OCZ? Thanks

I have an OCZ Vendetta 2 with a Scythe Ultra Kaze 2k cooling the lapped Q6600 B3 in my workstation. If you're familiar with the different steppings of Q6600s you'll know that the B3s are space-heaters. The Vendetta 2 keeps temps under 60 degrees at 3.2GHz which is pretty impressive given the amount of heat these things put out.

The Xiggy and the V2 are pretty much neck-and-neck but with a little creativity you can mount push-pull fans on the Xiggy and you can only mount one fan on the Vendetta. With two fans the X-tek will pull ahead by a degree or two I think.

BTW: Intel thermal spec for Q6600s are 71 degrees for the G0 and 62 degrees for the B3.

87 degrees is way too high!

weird, i had a blue orb II cooling my q6600 at 3 Ghz for the longest time and it held it's own just fine.