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AMD Aircooling Round-Up of 2003
JMke writes: "If you want a silent AMD system you almost always have to get yourself a higher-class heatsink. Thermalright and other manufactures have brought out updated products that can keep your CPU cool while keeping the noise down, hardware geek site Madshrimps has published a roundup of the best heatsinks from 2003 that money can buy in 2004, read it here."
Zalman 7000-Cu!!!
Best Heatsink I've ever owned. Solid, and frosty.
One thing I found to help keep it quite is to actually clean the dust off the fan blades.
It runs almost completely silent and keeps things impressively cool. Didn't have to buy special thermal grease, either. It's also compatible with Pentium 4's and the Athlon 64. It really is teh uber, and comes with a free fanmate to manually adjust fan speed. However, it is huge and doesn't fit on all motherboards, so buyer beware.
I'm using the AMD supplied fan/HS on my XP2600/333 and it's louder then the PS fan, or any other fans for that matter. There was something useful on a review site some time back, where they reviewed the individual fans. Once you found a sink you liked you could usually go quieter with an Oryx or somesuch fan. That info would be welcome. Which fans are quietest, without sacrificing CFM/RPM.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
:edit: Site appears to be slowing/not responding :/edit:
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Conclusion
Let's look at the advantages and disadvantages of the reviewed products
Swiftech MCX462-V
(Provided by: Bacata)
PRO
Plug&Play installation
Easy attachment of both 80&90mm fans
Top end performance in both silent as loud categories
CON
Higher price
The MCX462-V is a true engineering beauty, combining functionality with top performance, the helicoid pin layout allows for very low noise production when using different types of fans. The full copper block provides excellent thermal conduction making overclocking possible even with very silent fans!
Thermalright SP-97
(Provided by: Thermalright)
PRO
1st class performance in all categories
Secure installation
Efficiency increases with the CPU overclock thanks to the heat pipes
CON
Installation requires motherboard removal
The successful formula from the SP-94 Intel heatsink has been brought over to the AMD side of town, and the performance is stunting, providing excellent results no matter what fan is used, it edges out the competition by a comfortable margin!
Thermalright SLK947-U
(Provided by: Bacata)
PRO
Good overall performance
Secure installation
Competitively priced
CON
Installation requires motherboard removal
The "older" SLK947-U still delivers very respectable results, although its performance has been surpassed by the SP-97, it manages to provide the best performance/price ratio in this roundup. If you are on a budget but still want top end air-cooling for your AMD setup then look no further then the latest SLK from Thermalright!
Scythe Kamakaze
(Provided by: Bacata)
PRO
Includes a Fan + Rheobus
Decent performance
CON
Installation method far from perfect on all motherboards
I had a lot of installation issues with this heatsink but that was due to the socket/capacitor layout used by the board on which we did the test. The performance is average, edging out the old PAL8045 by a very small margin.
Evercool MAG-01 & CUF-715CA
(Provided by: Evercool)
PRO
Very easy installation
Decent performance
Silent 70mm fan included
Very competitively priced
CON
Not "strong" enough for overclocking your AMD
Both Evercool heatsink proved to be worthy replacements for the Stock AMD cooler, providing better cooling at lower noise levels while being priced at only ~20! My preference goes out to the MAG-01 as it can be installed on almost all popular Sockets out there from Intel & AMD. The copper/alu mix does have an impact on the performance when compared to the full copper CUF-715CA, but the difference is minimal.
Dan's Data has amazing heat sink reviews. Dan tests each heat sink with a heater simulating the Pentium or Athlon CPU. He publishes the R-theta values for each sink tested and has a very straightforward scientific view of the whole process.
The CPU fan is both more important and, generally, quieter than the power supply.
Not in my experience, usually the CPU fans are 60mm and higher RPM, whereas the power supply is generally larger with a slower RPM. To the first order RPM == noise...
These days there isn't much jeopardy to run a couple degrees hotter for several dB quieter operation. I know that Intel CPUs will throttle down if they get dangerously hot. Frankly I'd rather save my hearing and sanity than the CPU anyway.
One additional annoyance is that most motherboard manufacturers go to the added length of putting unnecessary fans on the board chipset as well. These tend to be small (40mm) and run at stupidly high speeds (6000+ RPM) given the amount of power dissipation they need to counter.
One system I have, a shuttle XPC, doubles up the task of case fan and CPU cooler. I pulled the fan off the board chipset, and also the graphics card (replaced the graphics one with a Zalman passive), pulled the 80mm 5000 RPM Sunon dustbuster fan off the CPU heatsink and replaced it with a 2500 RPM much quieter fan. Now it runs with a total of two fans, CPU and PS, much quieter even at full load. How is this possible without having the thing cook itself ?? simple by underclocking - running the FSB at 190MHz instead of 200MHz. Performance difference is incremental and it runs stable at full load (and its much much quieter).
Well my work desktop runs at around 60 decibels from ~2 feet away. Yes, that's loud. And it's an Intel P3 system from IBM. I want a new desktop PC purely because it's so damn loud... I don't actually need more CPU, memory, or disk.
My home PCs are all AMD, all with the stock fan/hs. The stock AMD fan/hs isn't incredibly noisy, but it certainly isn't the quietest thing out there. The loudest system is really quite bad -- but it's because of a very loud PS fan and several case fans. I'll eventually take some steps to quiet it down, because it is ungodly loud (at least to me).
If you really want to reduce system noise, then check out Silent PC Review. They do some real testing of sound levels and give some pretty solid advice on how to quiet PCs.
Is the Vantec Aeroflow with TMD fans (that are very quiet).
I like this site because it reviews all kinds of PC silencing stuff, not just heatsinks/fans. Seems to be modeled on the popular www.storagereview.com site.
Has reviews of...
DIY Systems
Prebuilt Systems
Cases & Damping
Power Supplies
Cooling
Fans & Controls
Storage
If you are concerned about noise, and still want a good heatsink, get a Zalman.
I have the new copper flower, which has ~400 fins on it. And a 92mm fan sitting in between them...at max rpm's it is 25dbs. And it keeps my 2500+ oc'ed to 3000+ under control easily.
It weighs about 2 lbs, and instead of hooking into the socket, it has mounts that screw directly into the motherboard.
Another plus side, it comes with a free controller that can take the fan down to 21bs.
That paired with 4 vantec stealth fans, and a zalman 400 watt PSU, and a DigiDoc 5+ fan controller, the only thing I can hear running most of the time is the CPU Fan, and that barely, and then the subdued whine of my 9800 Pro AIW fan...which I don't want to replace for warranty reasons yet...
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Because you still have to send the heat somewhere, and with with a Peltier you've got to get rid of the heat of the CPU plus the heat of the Peltier. And if you don't move enough heat away or if the Peltier fails then you end up with even more heat in the CPU.
Another problem is that since the Peltier cools the CPU to below ambient you have to worry about condensation forming around the CPU and causing a short.
Well, three really.
I wanted a very quiet PC. I bought a huge, solid, steel case, customized with a 120mm fan on the back (theory: big and slow == quiet). I got a Zalman "flower" heatsink/fan (HSF), and mounted the big Zalman fan to blow over it. I got an Enermax power supply with a speed adjustment. It's pretty quiet; I hear a fan, but I think that's the GeForce 4 card's fan.
I wanted to make a quiet PC for my wife. I bought a Lian Li aluminum case, an Arctic Cooling HSF, and a similar Enermax power supply. No fancy 120mm fan on the back, just a standard 80mm fan, but I used a very quiet one with thermostatic control so it is very slow and quiet when the system is cool. This computer, as it turns out, is almost completely silent! Much quieter than my computer. I did use a GeForce4 MX board in her system, because it has just a passive heat sink (no cooling fan), so perhaps that explains it.
I loved working with the Lian Li case. It's a PC-60 model with USB. I also much preferred the Arctic Cooling HSF. I got my Arctic Cooling HSF form SVC.com:
http://svc.com/arcoolsupsil.html
P.S. About the quiet power supply: I got a 365 Watt power supply with two cooling fans, one with a speed control and one with a thermal control (automatically runs faster when hot). This power supply has "Active PFC", which I don't completely understand, but I gather it is a more efficient way to convert AC to DC and thus makes less waste heat. It has a 3-pin jumper to attach to the motherboard, so the motherboard can monitor the speed of the power supply's main fan, and also so that the motherboard can signal to the power supply that it wants all fans powered down for sleep mode. (I don't think either computer is ever really sleeping at the moment. I ought to play around with ACPI and get that working, but they are quiet enough that it hasn't been a priority.) I ordered the power supplies from Directron. This one isn't the exact same model but it has the same features:
http://www.directron.com/eg465axve.html
P.S. Why is it really a tale of three Athlon XPs? Because I crunched one trying to put on the HSF. With an Athlon XP, be very, very careful when putting on the HSF. You can make a very expensive mistake! I'm looking forward to Athlon64 and Opteron with a heat spreader protecting the chip.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I replaced my PS, blindly assuming that it was the source of the extremely loud fan noise on a 1.4Ghz Athlon system. There was almost no change, so I tried the machine with the case off, and determined that the CPU fan was loud. I replaced it with a Thermaltake, and immediately noticed a huge drop in noise.
Thanks for posting that...I'm afraid he was /.'d way before I got to the site.
I'm going to agree that the Thermalright SP-97 is the best air cooled heatsink out right now...for overclocking or silent pc operation. If you want to go extreme overclocking, toss some ridiculously loud/high CFM fan on there...for silent PC run a slower RPM, quieter fan. Either way this heatsink will do its job.
I just upgraded from an XP 2800+ that I bought last December to an XP 2500+ Barton...I took the Barton and changed the FSB from 333mhz to 400mhz...resulting in a 3200+ Barton (very common thing right now). With the retail heatsink/fan combo the diode (core CPU) temperature would max at around 60 c. It was rock solid (24 hours of distributed.net running in the background with BF1942 w/ 63 AI players and myself with 1600x1200 resolution to generate as much video card heat as possible...even with my guy just sitting at the spawn), but the 60 c temperature made me nervous.
I ordered one of the new Thermalright SP-97 and tossed it on there with the Tornado 92mm high RPM fans...the max temperature (even in a warm room) dropped to 44 c. Unfortunately the sound of that fan was just too much for me. I pulled it off and put my old 80mm fan (still a really good fan...65 CFM or so as opposed to the 119 CFM of the Tornado) on instead. It still maxes out to 44 c. I've been meaning to push the FSB higher, to see exactly how far I can go, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
The Thermalright SP-97 is the best heatsink I've ever used (keep in mind that you have the have a P4 CPU mount style motherboard as it doesn't have the CPU socket clips...and if it did you probably wouldn't want to use them, as this is a pretty hefty unit).
First off, I'm not an overclocker.
I've built 4 systems in the last two years, all configured with the factory heatsink with the fan removed, Antec TruePower power supplies (300 to 500 watts) with the Antec fans, and a single Vantec Stealth 80mm fan exhausting out the back of the case. Round cables throughout. Good quality cases, somewhat oversized.
All these systems' CPUs would overheat with the fanless heatsinks, until I did one simple thing to each of them:
Suspend a 120mm Vantec Stealth about two inches over the factory aluminum heatsink, offcenter, blowing right down into the heatsink blades. The 80mm case exhaust fan sits right next to the CPU in each case. No extra holes in the case.
A Pentium III 933Mhz system running Devil Linux (my firewall) previously ran at 110F to 120F, now runs at 77F. Just now, I stopped the 120mm fan, and CPU temperature climbs 2F every five seconds, until it stabilizes at 113F. Restarting the fan produces a similarly fast drop in temperature.
My Pentium 4 systems, including one that has a substantial in-the-cabinet raid array, all run between 85F and 98F CPU temp. I don't even want to think about what they'd do without that 120mm fan blowing on them.
Low speed, large volume is *quiet* and *cool*.
Excepting the large raid array laden system, not one of these machines can be heard from 5 feet away.
People are overthinking cooling.
Peace. Quiet. Cheap. Cool.
Aaaaahhhhhhhh!
Take a look at the Antec Sonata case (part of their LifeStyle series). Comes with a quiet power supply and a quiet case fan (and you get a 2nd Panaflow 120mm for the hard drive area). Those cases are only around $100-$120.
The bigger the fan, the less RPM it needs to push a given volume of air... this usually means less noise.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Start by replacing your case with a quieter case. Most folks seem to like the Antec Sonatas which are around $110 or so. The case fans in those are 120mm instead of the usual 80mm in a normal desktop case.
Also, you can get a 60mm to 80mm adapter and use an 80mm fan on your CPU instead of a 60mm. (The 80mm can run at a lower RPM which means less noise.)
Not in my experience, usually the CPU fans are 60mm and higher RPM, whereas the power supply is generally larger with a slower RPM. To the first order RPM == noise...
Eh, noise is really related to the amount of air being moved (CFM) and the path the air takes. Air through the PS is very turbulent, while air off the CPU (& other flat surfaces) is fairly smooth. Turbulence == noise.
One additional annoyance is that most motherboard manufacturers go to the added length of putting unnecessary fans on the board chipset as well. These tend to be small (40mm) and run at stupidly high speeds (6000+ RPM) given the amount of power dissipation they need to counter.
Like the little 40mm fan that was cooling the northbridge on my KT7A-RAID, until it stopped working (dust). Now the board only sees one HD.
...Time is the best teacher, unfortunately it kills all of its students.
If you use linux, you can find out just how loud your hard drives are by typing "hdparm -y /dev/hda /dev/hdb (etc)" replacing hda/hdb with the appropriate device names of your hard drives. The -y will put them into standby mode, making them spin down. For me, this makes the difference between lots of noise and hardly any noise.
The moral of this story is: don't get sucked into the hype of silent cpu fans like I did... when there are possibly much louder components to work on.
removing the plates is not always a good idea, the point of having them blocked is actually to increase air flow past the items needed. If you remove those plates then the air will rush out past your cards as apposed to passing your processor. anywhere their is a whole in your case their should be a fan pushing or pulling. This is more important than just letting lots of area for air to enter or leave your case. For instance, blow air through a straw and that air moves very quicly through the straw, now cut slits in the straw and feel it. Air won't move as quickly, in fact the extra opening will create eddies, and blow back. I hope I am displaying this idea clearly. Put those plates back in cause your just making your computer ugly, not increasing air movement.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
Here is how I quieted down an athlonXP 1700 system to the point that I got driven nuts instead by the motor noise of my hard drives:
Power supply: antec TRUEpower 380w. This unit puts out plenty of nice clean power, and also has a dedicated 3.3v rail as opposed to being a fork from teh 5v rail. This just means it's a more robust unit. Also runs incredibly quiet.
CPU Fan: Zalman flower (I think 3500). This clip on unit has a bracket fan and a speed knob. I echewed the speed knob and replaced teh 92mm fan on the bracket with a 120mm enermax variable RPM fan, reason for this is further down.
VGA cooling: Zalman heatpipe cooler (something 80) This unit has NO fans, and uses a massive surface area to dissipate heat. It uses heatpipes to achieve efficient heat transfer to both heatsink elements on this cooler. This cooler works so well that the mere circulation effect from my 120mm fan was enough to keep a GeForce4 TI4400 running smoothly.
Motherboard cooling: I yanked the fan off my motherboard, that 120mm fan was more than enough to keep it cool due to it's proximity to the CPU socket, and how large that fan is.
The system overall was so quiet I turned it off on accident a few times becuase I wanted to turn it on, and couldn't hear it. The hard drive noise is only noticable at very short distances, but hard drive access will be very audible due to teh low noise floor, and I found it to be slightly bothersome.
Ultimately I moved to watercooling, to get quiet with more powerful components. I cannot reccomend watercooling to everyone however, since it still has many risks that even a skilled PC assembler may have trouble with.
At the risk of getting a little off-topic, I recently bought one of the AquariusII kits to cool a 700MHz Duron home PC. I fitted the cooler per manufacturers specs, and switched on: Great, quiet and cool running. A week later the PC died - the heatsink had slipped off the mounting and the Duron died a terrible thermal death :( .
I replaced with a new MB, RAM and AMD Athlon 2200+ CPU (it was Christmas, after all). Connected up, and it ran for a couple of restarts (3-4 days) before failing. The heatsink had slipped and the (new) CPU was toast :( :( :( .
I looked at the mounting kit much more carefully after that, and basically the heatsink mounting for the socket A sucks. The design does not allow for a solid mouning of the heatsink on the Socket A. (The mounting mechanism on the Socket 462 is great). The heatsinkis held on by a small clip which is prone to shake loose if there is any vibration or movement.
I've found it is possible to mount the heatsink solidly on the Socket A, but it's not possible using the manufacturesrs method. I'm still trying to decide if I should revive the PC with a new CPU and try again, or revert to the Zalman air cooling that was in place previously.