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AMD Ships Heavy Duty Cooling With Latest Processor
jmke writes "With the increasing heat output of recent processors both Intel and AMD are shipping larger and heavier heatsink/fan combo's to cool them down. AMD has now incorporated heat pipe technology, which is usually only found in more expensive third party CPU cooling solutions. This test compares the new heatsink to a popular 3rd party product and it turns out that the new AMD unit is very impressive: high performance and silent operation from a free CPU cooler? AMD has done it! Now if only Intel would follow."
Your pc will still be generating heat, it will just be radiating it more efficiently, without requiring a vacuum cleaner of a fan to generate enough cooling airflow.
Well, considering the fact that you also get a 3 year warranty with the retail boxes
That's not much of a risk since cpus pretty much never die from any cause that would be covered under warranty.
Well, the dual core parts are the first to use the 110W TDP, the older FX S939 parts were 104W so it's not a major increase but a creeping power usage.
AMD has been trying to retail compatability with all S939 boards, including the early NF3 and K8T800 Pro boards. I don't know AMD's original requirements for the current the motherboard should be able to supply to the CPU, but I do know the dual core parts can draw about 10A more than the original highest power parts on S939. That may be one factor that's driving AMD's thermal envolopes.
We'll see if AMD keeps thermal requirements in check when the move to their new socket this spring where they can mandate huge amperage requirements again (looking forward for their 65nm parts).
And now for something completely different
why is this a story? All of the retail dual core AMD chips come with heat pipe coolers. It's been this way for months. The X2 3800+ that's only an 89W part ships with a heat pipe cooler as its stock cooler.
But I also wouldn't be surprised if overclocking eats into the sales AMD's higher-margin models.
I don't really think it eats into it that much. The people that can afford the $1,000 FX chips either have money to burn and could care less about overclocking, or they are the type of person that seriously cares about getting that last 2 frames per second in their favorite FPS game... which means they will happily overclock it so they can get 3 instead of 2. The kind of person that thinks in terms of "best bang for the buck" won't be buying a FX chip either way, they'll buy the $200 cpu that is only 10% slower.