Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: Dan on July 16, 2003, 02:55:51 AM
-
My stupid PC gives me headaches!
Can I run it without a CPU-fan, with just a heatsink?
Its a 1,2GHz amd duron. Also what is the fastest Intel or AMD cpu that can be run without a fan?
I heard that the AmigaOne G4 has a CPUfan, that is not cool, why?
My A1200 060 50Mhz doesn`t need a fan.
-
Can I run it without a CPU-fan, with just a heatsink?
Not likely.... a 1.2ghz can cook up some heat. I wouldn't dream of taking the big-ass hsf off my 1.2ghz T-Bird.
You could use a Zalman cooler, or some other low-noise solution, though.
Also what is the fastest Intel or AMD cpu that can be run without a fan?
Not very fast. I haven't seen a PC faster than a couple hundred mhz without an active fan somewhere. (now granted, some later designs up in the 400-500mhz range used a large heat-sink on a cpu and routed air from the power supply fan over it...) But, even then, I've not seen one over 500mhz or so.
I heard that the AmigaOne G4 has a CPUfan, that is not cool, why?
My A1200 060 50Mhz doesn`t need a fan.
You just typed the answer, yourself. a 50 mhz chip with ~2.2 million transistors (68060) vs 700+ mhz chip with over 6 million transistors (g3/g4).
To run a chip that is that much more complex, you need more power. (You're not going to run a modern computer on a 50-100watt A1200 power supply, either!) You add more power, you get more heat. More heat means you need a better way to dissipate it. Hence, larger fins, more fans.
-
Don't know about the AmigaOne PPC but, my son in-law has a Imac II with a 1 Ghz G4 cpu and it has no fan and a dinky heat sink. My 450Mhz cube has a larger heat sink than his and it's really not that big, and has NO Fan! :-D
-
Try larger fans running at a slower RPM
This will make things quieter. I am trying to arrange the import of some GMC Noblesse SE cases to the states. These cases have soundproofing throughout the case. All the drives are isolated with rubber and teflon. Even the Power supply is equiped with dampers. makes for a very quiet PC or AmigaOne/Pegasos
Or you can buy ASAKA soundproofing for your case.
The heatsink fan on the Amigaone G4 is anemic to say the least very puny. Not much noise or heat.
But I recomend you replace it with one a little more robust.
-
by Dan on 2003/7/15 21:55:51
Can I run it without a CPU-fan, with just a heatsink?
Try looking at this heat sink with no fan (large case fan is required thought) Zalman (http://www.zalman.co.kr/english/product/cnps6500b-cu.htm)
Dammy
-
Bought me a Hush (http://www.hushtechnologies.net) and love it.
No fan, quiet HD, I leave it running all the time (low power too) and even under load (emerging under Gentoo) it doesn't have any problems.
What do I call it? It hath been so named: "amigatoo". That's it's net name. Based on the idea that, according Amiga Inc. at one point, if I bought Amiga Forever, any computer I run it on is an OFFICIAL AMIGA!
So it's an Amiga. An Amiga Hush PC.
:-P
Erik
-
The best and silent Ventilators are here
Verax (http://www.verax.de)
They have PSU, CPU and VGA-Cooler
BTW I can sleep in front of my PC...so silent
-
http://www.quietpc.com (http://www.quietpc.com)
-
Bought me a Hush and love it.
The Hush is pretty cool, so is the Tranquil PC...... The same computer in a different case. :-D
Still cool though.
-
Look also for the silent coolers :
http://www.arctic-cooling.com/en/
I'm using the Artic Cooling Cooper Silent with a Athlon XP 2000+ and it's very, very silent (not complete silence but very quiet.
No its webpage, it's rated at 20 dB. Now you know that other cooler with 20 dB should be quiet (at least for me. And I also value the silence on a computer :-)
Figure out it your PSU also makes noise ...
In that case, look for a silent PSU also.
(damn PC technology! Speed first, comfort later)
BTW : do you know how to post a follow up on these forums instead of reply like i did now ?)
-
Try larger fans running at a slower RPM
Thats exactly what the iMac G4 does - it has a fairly low speed fan running at the top of the dome, pulling air up through the base and around the inside metal casing. Heat pipes carry the heat from the cpu out to that case. They're quieter than the HD itself.
The convection iMacs have the G3 in contact with a rather massive plate of aluminum that's also connected to a mesh just on the inside of the case - most of the air that passes up through the machine goes through that mesh. Same kind of idea :) - lots of air, moving slowly. instead of smaller patches of highspeed air.
-
Hmmm....fans....go for the Zalman Flower...have one at home as its as close to silent as you can get. You will see why when you have a look at a pic of it.
PSU....quietpc.com Got one yesterday for work and you can hardly hear it.
CPUs running without fans....Via have released their x86 processors...the 533 and 800 MHz ones can be used without a fan. And they are dirt cheap
-
I've been researching this one as well... http://www.endpcnoise.com/ has some good solutions....
The Zalman flower looks interesting, but takes up a lot of space in your case and also exceeds Intel and AMD's weight guidelines for heatsinks...
;)
-
This is exactly the type of thinking we need for Amigas. The complete solution not just a Motherboard. Whats wrong with specifying a mininum spec SE system a nice looking case which is dead silent (ie Segate Baraccuda H/D, Radeon 9200 (or even 9600 when the price is right) both have only passive heatsinks, Silent PSU, etc.
I'm looking forward to a Hush type system (see mentioned elsewhere) with an Amiga iATX board in it (G3 FX/GX will do!). I've got case designs drawn up already if anyone is interested in producing 'em.
And all these comparisons between PPC vs x86, never compare like with like. Lets see a comparison of G3/4 with Mobile CPUs like the Pentium 4-M and Pentium-M. I'm possitive you would see Price/Performance ratios that are very close...(IMHO!)
BTW was I dreaming about iATX Amigas, I'm sure I heard this from Eyetech and now I can't find any mentions at all! Please someone find me some info so I know I'm not completely insane! :-D
-
Can I run it without a CPU-fan, with just a heatsink?
Dont even try that... it will fry after a while. There is more silent coolers out there also, which still does a good job at cooling it down.
Though... if you underclock it and set it to lowest voltage... then it should work fine.. even my TB 1400 did if i clocked it down to 600mhz using lowest core voltage... i think it was 1.0-1.1 or something
And yeah... as EgonSpenglerUK said.. Via has some nice chips that run fine with just a small heatsink and they are cheap.. You get both miniatx motherboard with integreated audio, gfx, network for less than the price of a modern amd/intel cpu.
-
Wolfe wrote:
Don't know about the AmigaOne PPC but, my son in-law has a Imac II with a 1 Ghz G4 cpu and it has no fan and a dinky heat sink. My 450Mhz cube has a larger heat sink than his and it's really not that big, and has NO Fan! :-D
PPC is very different this way, they generate way less heat than the amd x86 cpus. Even a intel p1 clocked at higher clockspeeds than 133 should have a fan.
-
I have a 167Mhz Pentium with no fan, just sink :P. Runs fine, but thats as high as I'd take it. I'm not taking the fans out of my 2000 though, stupid vacuum cleaner it is.
I have seen really really big +$$ heatsinks for fast new computers, but they look like copper sculptures, sorta ridiculous, but viable if you got a foot all round your processor.
-
have a 167Mhz Pentium with no fan, just sink :P. Runs fine
Sure, you can run it... but its definitely not healthy for it. You should atleast have some passive cooling, like case fans.
-
PSU noise I can live with, but CPUfan is to loud.
I looked inside the case and found a 6cm Spire 12V fan and an aluminium heatsink. Would a big slow case fan help?
http://www.zalman.co.kr/english/product/cnps6000Cu.htm (http://www.zalman.co.kr/english/product/cnps6000Cu.htm)
Looks like what I want.
How loud is 20dB? compared to PSU fan?
Soundproofing is isolation which would require a faster airflow, wonder how silent it would be in if i put it in a closet or made a wooden frame around it?
Does the Hush Mini ITX EPIA M10000 Nehemiah 1000Mhz run without a fan???
Would love to run AROS on a fanless MiniITX board.
So it´s possible to run a highspeed G4 without a fan?
Stupid pc engineers why dont they mount the processor on the otherside of the motherboard then it would be possible to use the whole side of the tower as a heatsink. And making a powersupply that replaced the top of the pc case with a heatsink would be easy. The outside of the case has an unlimited airflow after all so it wouldn´t need a fast, if any fan.
-
Dan wrote:
PSU noise I can live with, but CPUfan is to loud.
I looked inside the case and found a 6cm Spire 12V fan and an aluminium heatsink. Would a big slow case fan help?
http://www.zalman.co.kr/english/product/cnps6000Cu.htm (http://www.zalman.co.kr/english/product/cnps6000Cu.htm)
Looks like what I want.
How loud is 20dB? compared to PSU fan?
Pretty quiet, likely. The thing I don't like about Zalmans is less their mediocre results (not that extra cooling is important, but I like to 'nudge' AMD chips to their highest safe FSB - thus I had my 850MHz T-Bird unlocked to run at 133MHz/266DDR, resulting in a marginal overclock - 866MHz - but that much faster memory access)... than the fact that their fan brackets down to your slot covers, and thus requires one of those ricey side-grilles to function efficiently (and makes it dangerous to run your machine while swapping cards in those slots, obviously).
Personally, I ran my 850, thus-clocked, with a Thermaltake Mini Super Orb, but the noise drove me insane and the fan bearings started going rather quickly. I replaced it with one of Antec's Molex-style units, which, while not killer in silence, was much less annoying, and performed reliably up until I took the system apart. (I gather Molex's real designs are even better, as the Antec's fan was sort of permanently molded on to their shroud.)
This is the Antec I'm thinking of (http://www.bit-tech.net/review/45/); they were available at CompUSAs and probably Staples, rated up to 1.4GHz or so. That guy's demonstrating a big DON'T in the installation, though - you should never push down on a heatsink on an exposed-core chip, as the leverage applied is a recipe for cracking; put pressure only on the clip, even if it takes you a while to get it latched.
AMD also has excellent datasheets on their site; the chips are *designed* to run up to 60C or so, depending on model. They list dissipations and all that, so you can comapre your Duron to the models the various heatsinks around are rated 'up to.'
Soundproofing is isolation which would require a faster airflow, wonder how silent it would be in if i put it in a closet or made a wooden frame around it?
If you're not in the room, I'd hope you can't hear it. Wood conducts sound, so that wouldn't be much help unless you're adding padding (like one of those old dot-matrix printer enclosures). People are fond of car audio products, like Dynamat; I've always been interested in trying some Noisekiller or Roadkill (spray-on deadening foam products, rather hard to track down, and a bit pricey).
Does the Hush Mini ITX EPIA M10000 Nehemiah 1000Mhz run without a fan???
Would love to run AROS on a fanless MiniITX board.
Yep. Via chips are your only option with the Hush products for now.
So it´s possible to run a highspeed G4 without a fan?
No-doubt depends on the G4. The Beige G3 here (based on the original IBM 750 design; I forget if it had letters after it) has no "fan," but it has a heatsink the size of your fist, two gigantic, loud power supply fans, one that ends up directly over the CPU with the cover closed, and a piece of metal that apparently serves as a thermal bond (attaching the heatsink to the metal of the case) as much as a grounding contact.
Stupid pc engineers why dont they mount the processor on the otherside of the motherboard then it would be possible to use the whole side of the tower as a heatsink. And making a powersupply that replaced the top of the pc case with a heatsink would be easy. The outside of the case has an unlimited airflow after all so it wouldn´t need a fast, if any fan.
Last I checked, most people put their machines places like under desks, in racks, etc. People were fond of killing their Mac cubes by resting papers or CDs atop the 'chimney.' (Hmm, maybe they shouldn't have made it flat..) Surfaces can only radiate heat so fast, safety and RFI guidelines have to be met, and so forth. (Pop open your power supply sometime, and touch one of the heatsinks- in many designs they're hot, and I don't mean in temperature.) Manufacturers are also mostly interested in ideas that can apply equally to racks and other server-type enclosures, now that desktops are a low-profit commodity game.
Now, some of the recent Shuttles use heatpipes and radiators with large-diameter fans; perhaps you should check out that hardware, and see if it can fit in your case (or if it'd be cheaper to swap your chip into the usual case/mainboard combo they're sold as)...
-
Meh. I like that "J79 at full afterburner" sound of my case and heatsink (and GPU and HD) fans going :) but I'm weird.
'Sides, they're usually drowned out by music or game sound effects!
-
@B00tDisk
Amen brotha!
Yawl just don't have your MP3 players up loud enough! :-D
-
You need a fan for that as AMD runs hellish hot !!! a quiet fan and heat sink for that would be cooler master HHC-L61... It uses heatpipe technology and will work on 2800 + Athlon XP chips also... :-D
-
From the cooler master site...
If you have been annoyed by the noise, then you might be excited when you see this newly developed Low Noise Series cooler, HHC-L61. HHC-L61 is equipped with copper heat sink (with dual heat pipes) and silent fan (note: 3000 rpm) which provide low noise environment with minimal loss of performance to cope with the cooling effects for high-speed CPU nowadays.
Fan Dimension 60 x 60 x 25 mm
Rated Speed 3000 RPM
Air Flow 14.13 CFM
Rated Voltage 12 VDC
Heat Sink Dimension 80 x 60 x 44 mm
Rja (ºC/W) = 0.6 (FC - PGA)
retail available at :
http://www.tcwo.com/cgi-bin/webc.cgi/st_prod.html?p_prodid=2360
-
I also have a Duron 1200 and the noise was so irritating that I bought myself an Arctic Cooling Super Silent, which is... super silent, actually. The thing is that my computer is still almost as noisy, because the bad guys are my video card and my HD, not the CPU fan...
If I were you, I'd check how much difference a silent CPU fan would make by holding my finger on your current CPU fan a few seconds after start-up and then releasing it to hear the difference (if it doesn't spin up immediately, give it a spin manually... in the right direction... and it will continue by itself). At start-up the CPU is cool enough that the heatsink will do the job on its own, so don't worry, the CPU won't get destroyed. :-D
If you decide to go for a silent fan, there are many good suggestions in this thread. As I said, I have an Arctic Cooling, which is very competitively priced. My Super Silent Pro TC cost about $15. The newer Copper Silent models cost more, but aren't necessary for a Duron. The problem with the Arctic Cooling fans is that they're so slow that my motherboard thinks I don't have a CPU fan at start-up... :-P Therefore I've had to disable the CPU fan monitoring in my BIOS setup, otherwise my computer won't boot. But I guess that problem is common with other slow CPU fans.
/Martin
-
I'm not sure if this is done in Europe, but in the US (canada as well?) there's a "Traveling computer show" that most folks who have an e-business selling computers or computer parts attend and buy booths at. It's year-round, and there's usually one show a month here in Orlando (redrumloa and a few others probably know about 'em - Marketpro shows). Anyway, it's a good place to pick up cheap computer parts (I grabbed three 9 gig 7200RPM SCSI UW drives to throw into my video editing box for a paltry $15 each!).
ANYway, the point being is that I recall one vendor who had a few heatsinks set up on display, hooked to a power supply, but with no CPU underneath.
On the underside of each heatsink frost had formed, and yes, Virginia, if you stuck your finger to it and held it there your fingertip would freeze onto the HS!
They were, IIRC, "golden orb" fan/hs combos.
Anyway, there was a point to this...ah well :)
-
Do you know the recommended working temperature for a Duron? I downloaded some pdfs at amd.com but it just says that it shuts down on 125C.
And which temperature can the motherboard and the harddisks handle?
Do I need a case fan?
-
My old Compaq PIII-600 was brilliant. The PSU made no sound, there was a heatsink over the P3 cartridge and a nice big fan (so quiet I didn't even know it was there until a couple of days ago!) at the front to cool the CPU. It got replaced by a Tiny Computers refubished Athlon 1800+ which sounded like a hurricane, but saved on the gas bill if nothing else!
So I obtained a new Enermax PSU to replace the old (90 watt!) one, which has already made the system quieter and cooler. The main offender now is the CPU fan...
Running a web server from my bedroom became impossible to do because of the new system's noise, and I can't really describe the relief I feel when I turn it off and the fans spin down. I think back to the days when my A500 would play Jesus on E's through my hifi and sigh... lol sorry went a bit funny for a second there :-D
Anyway since I have such a soft spot for the Compaq P3 it's going to be put back into use as my 24hrs a day webserver 'cause I can actually sleep with it in my room :lol:
Sorry for the long, strange and maybe pointless post here, i just started babbling and thought i might as well finish :-D
-edit-
oh yes, that was my point, you can't crank the mp3's when it's time for sleep :-)
-
I downloaded some PDFs at AMD's site too, a while back. IIRC it said 90C was the maximum. With my Arctic Cooling Super Silent my Duron 1200 runs at 45-50C, though. Since you live in Sweden, check out GTEK, that's where I bought my cooler. The Arctic Cooling Copper Silent TC (http://www.gtek.se/index.php?mode=item&id=791) is quite cheap there and will keep your CPU ice cold even in the current summer heat. And with a 20dB noise level you won't even hear it.
Check the manufacturer's site for your hard drive and mobo or check the manuals for recommended temperatures. Unless you overclock there's usually no need for a case fan.
/Martin
-
that_punk_guy wrote:
My old Compaq PIII-600 was brilliant. The PSU made no sound, there was a heatsink over the P3 cartridge and a nice big fan (so quiet I didn't even know it was there until a couple of days ago!) at the front to cool the CPU.
Compaq's Presario desktop PII systems (Slot1) didn't even have a CPU fan - just an aluminium heat sink the size of a PopTart (about 4x6 inches) that was directly in line for airflow from the front of the case to the power supply - that is, air was sucked in the front by the PS fan and blown out the back, and along the way passed over the CPU-HS.
Horrible systems overall though; they finally (?) abandoned the whole PCI-slots-on-riser-card with the later Presario desktops and just stuck the slots on the MB (900mhz and up). I'm talking about the systems they provided for businesses, now, not home systems. Never touched a non-business Compaq...
-
if people complain over noise on the amigaone ppc (G4 800mzh) then lol.., i can't hear it...its there allright but i can't hear it.
its very silent and its 1/10 the size of a 1ghz pc fan.....
but u could always go for a silent capsule...
-
B00tDisk wrote:
Compaq's Presario desktop PII systems (Slot1) didn't even have a CPU fan - just an aluminium heat sink the size of a PopTart (about 4x6 inches) that was directly in line for airflow from the front of the case to the power supply - that is, air was sucked in the front by the PS fan and blown out the back, and along the way passed over the CPU-HS.
This was standard operating procedure for just about any slot-CPU system made by an OEM. (I'm not sure if any 'passive' Slot-A Athlons were ever shipped; common for the Intel camp, anyway.) All was not roses, though, as some chips/OEM designs shipped with undermassed heatsinks and fans that weren't up to the task- bad enough on a desktop, but imagine a lab of machines that'd all flake out as ambient temperatures varied. (This garnered specifically from a Slashdot post I read a while back from someone fed up with their specific Compaqs, yes. It's not hard to imagine.)
Horrible systems overall though; they finally (?) abandoned the whole PCI-slots-on-riser-card with the later Presario desktops and just stuck the slots on the MB (900mhz and up). I'm talking about the systems they provided for businesses, now, not home systems. Never touched a non-business Compaq...
Believe it or not, the riser design is a standard - NLX or LPX, I forget which. Deskpros were the business line, Presarios were consumer (and, after the launch of the initial PS/1 - iMac looking box, and a really neat looking 5x86? LCD lunchbox that I can't seem to find mention of anywhere nowadays, became mostly Generic Super-Socket-7-Motherboard in Generic Minitower Case... I guess they had a few with Generic Slot-1 Motherboard, too. Someone gave me a really awful model from the Presario's transition period from 'luxury crap' to 'generic crap,' a hefty desktop with nifty integrated speakers and amp, stock with a K5 or K6 of some sort, driven by the worst/first SDRAM chipset Intel ever made for that Socket.)... Risers would be great if the way they bolt them down didn't negate all the advantages.
After working with those for a while, you do develop something of a fetish for Torx screws. (Gotta love the way they provide spares!)
-
B00tDisk wrote:
On the underside of each heatsink frost had formed, and yes, Virginia, if you stuck your finger to it and held it there your fingertip would freeze onto the HS!
Those were likely using Peltier elements. They push heat across a gradient, given an electrical boost- cold side gets cold, hot side gets hot, and you'd better have a fan on the hot side to avoid burning the thing out (and/or having the waste heat 'leak' back to the thing you're trying to cool). Things are:
1. They use a fair bit of electricity, 40W or so.
2. They can only pump so much heat; putting an underpowered unit on your chip would be like wrapping it in fiberglass insulation - worse than using a passive heatsink with good conductivity. Sure, you're seeing it make frost in *air* (where the thermal load is effectively zero), but press a lightbulb against it for 20 minutes and see if the temperature at the interface is still that cold.
3. It's making frost. Frost is water; at warmer temperatures, frost is dew. A Peltier running with enough power to cool as good/better than a 'passive' heatsink and fan will be getting cold enough (especially on parts not contacting the hot chip) to condense water. This means you have to go nuts caulking and foaming your mainboard, socket, and cooling system. The expensive active cooling systems from Kryotech use (used to use? I dunno if Kryotech's still in business) refrigerant and compressors, as in your freezer, and they had some sort of heating strip around the edge of their contact pad to avoid condensation.
This from a guy who killed his Socket 7 board with drippage from a few years of Peltiering -- and never got a solid overclock for the effort. K6-2s had other limiting factors; cooling isn't the only thing that governs the highest stable clock of a chip.
They were, IIRC, "golden orb" fan/hs combos.
Golden Orb, IIRC, is Thermaltake's brand name for a now-ancient series of Socket 370 coolers, famous for looking bling, performing okay, and crushing Athlons to death before Thermaltake tried to redesign the clip, at which point more Athlons were crushed to death and they started marketing them as Socket-370 only.
Of course, anyone could pick up some Peltier elements, and thermal-epoxy them to the bottom of their favorite (cheapest) heatsink or fan. It'd also be pretty easy to store your heatsinks in your beer cooler (or even better, one full of dry ice), occasionally swapping out a fresh one to awe the rubes. ;)
-
So the moral of this story goes: Buy a PC and prepare to pay more to make it silent or be bombarded with noise. :-D
-
I heard the Zalman cooler was not so great. You'll need a loose fan in the case blowing right on it, anyway.
My dad and I both use an Antec case. His P4 is dead silent in that case and it never even gets warm. My Athlon, on the other hand, requires a Thermaltake Volcano 7 with a HUGE fan running at 3000 RPM to keep temp under control, and boy is it loud. I'm going to try some Arctic Silver thermal paste and maybe a Panaflow fan to replace the stock fan on the Volcano 7. If that doesn't reduce noise, I'll just buy my dad's P4.
Frankly, I've been regretting sticking with AMD ever since I bought it. If AMD doesn't get their act together, cap their cores, and start working on intelligent throttling like Intel, I'm jumping ship for good.
IMO, case mods, like padding and insulation are a waste of money, very heavy, and next to impossible to remove. Buy yourself a good, well-designed case with lots of slow-running fans, rather than patching the one you have with foam and carpet. ;-)
-
Wolfe wrote:
So the moral of this story goes: Buy a PC and prepare to pay more to make it silent or be bombarded with noise. :-D
The same goes for any computer system with a noisy HD and/or noisy video card... :-o
/Martin
-
Floid wrote:
B00tDisk wrote:
On the underside of each heatsink frost had formed, and yes, Virginia, if you stuck your finger to it and held it there your fingertip would freeze onto the HS!
Those were likely using Peltier elements.
Nope. These were fan/heatsink combos. No peltier coolers to be seen. The boxes for the particular ones were simple "generic" Taiwanese cardboard boxes with no mention of Peltier cooling. Although he did have some of those, IIRC.
3. It's making frost.
Well, the HS was just sitting on the table, "business side" up. This is in Florida, there's humidity all the time here, even when there's not.
-
Floid wrote:
This was standard operating procedure for just about any slot-CPU system made by an OEM. (I'm not sure if any 'passive' Slot-A Athlons were ever shipped; common for the Intel camp, anyway.) All was not roses, though, as some chips/OEM designs shipped with undermassed heatsinks and fans that weren't up to the task- bad enough on a desktop, but imagine a lab of machines that'd all flake out as ambient temperatures varied. (This garnered specifically from a Slashdot post I read a while back from someone fed up with their specific Compaqs, yes. It's not hard to imagine.)
Thank you, Deskpros. It's not like I worked on them for three years or anything :roll:. I swear I must be getting senile.
Anyway, the big huge problem we had with them was end-users trying to treat them like towers by putting them under their desks on their sides.
Problem: The HS was heavy enough to gradually drag the CPU out of the horizontally mounted socket; the system was never intended to be put this way. Convincing the end users otherwise was a royal pain in the ass.
Believe it or not, the riser design is a standard - NLX or LPX, I forget which. Risers would be great if the way they bolt them down didn't negate all the advantages.
LPX. The riser cards were just something else to break, and break they did...hate 'em.
After working with those for a while, you do develop something of a fetish for Torx screws. (Gotta love the way they provide spares!)
Yeah, I always thought that was "polite" of them. The later Deskpro TORX screws were dual-slotted; you could either use a flathead screwdriver or a Torx screw. Did you acquire a "Compaq Tool"? (Multihead screwdriver with a bajillion different sized Torx, flat, and Phillips heads).
-
For what it's worth, this is a proper Golden Orb (http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-52-1.htm). A passive cooler making *frost,* not *dew* on a desk in Florida? Erm. I seem to recall something about dry ice/liquid N2 snake-oil demos brought up in the 0v4rcl0ck4r circles a while back, but it's been a long time since that (and since the Golden Orb would ever have been adequate)...
Remember, a heatsink that feels cold *under load* isn't doing its job, and/or means your fan is overkill. ;) I know the Orb design(s), and the base was pretty massive, while the cute fins - especially on the Super Orb - didn't really soak up or transfer the heat that well. However, a block of metal that hefty could easily stay cold for hours after a night in a freezer (or a night with your PC off), allowing for such sales tricks, and providing more than adequate performance for the casual user. (My crappy Antec provided slightly higher numbers, with half the fans and a thousand less RPMs than my Super Orb, and the added advantage/cheat of its blow-on-the-chip-package design. However, the temperature stopped creeping upwards as the box gained uptime. That said, I've no fear for AmigaOnes with the Tt bling, since the wattages involved are nowhere near what we're talking with the older AMDs.)
Heck, if they were selling Peltiers, there's your answer- stack them on the cold sides of the peltiers during show setup, and they're probably chilled through by the time the rubes arrive. How many people are going to stop back multiple times over the day... and of those, how many are going to point fingers, vs. laughing with them? ;)
Anyway, the big huge problem we had with them was end-users trying to treat them like towers by putting them under their desks on their sides.
Problem: The HS was heavy enough to gradually drag the CPU out of the horizontally mounted socket; the system was never intended to be put this way. Convincing the end users otherwise was a royal pain in the ass.
Thanks for the warning, actually -- if I ever get back to adminning the Deskpro-Under-the-Desk, I'll think twice before putting it in a towerizing bracket. That said, the SECC clips on my particular model seemed firm enough that it'd take a good earthquake to accomplish same.
LPX. The riser cards were just something else to break, and break they did...hate 'em.
They're "interesting" to pull in and out, yeah. On my unit, the AGP card would come with; if they'd made the rest of the cardcage removable in similar fashion, it would've actually made things easy. Probably more a boon to their manufacturing, as they could doubtless stick populated risers in before clipping the mainboard to the case... or maybe they couldn't, seeing as it *is* Compaq.
After working with those for a while, you do develop something of a fetish for Torx screws. (Gotta love the way they provide spares!)
Yeah, I always thought that was "polite" of them. The later Deskpro TORX screws were dual-slotted; you could either use a flathead screwdriver or a Torx screw. Did you acquire a "Compaq Tool"? (Multihead screwdriver with a bajillion different sized Torx, flat, and Phillips heads).[/quote]Hm, I've met the dual-slotted, but IIRC they didn't cut/mold the slot all the way through, so you'd still need the Perfect Flathead Screwdriver Never Invented. I had a cheezy 'PC Toolkit' I got one holiday, but it served fine - it's thin-slotted Phillips screws that always cause pain.
Right now I'm using an old Intellistation, which is nice in a different way - IBM used little bolts made of a similar Indestructibilium, with slotted heads, about 6 or 7mm high... and all the 3.5" bays have come with blue rubber damping grommets for the screws, while the 5.25" bays pop out *easily* with a single unbolting, and the goofy molded faceplates pop off to reveal equally-aesthetic standard sized bays. Good luck getting the case panel off, though -- it's screwless, *if* you remember you're supposed to flex-and-shove it over its latch with the little handle provided -- and it'd require some major disassembly to see how they rigged up the built-on RFID hardware! (Disableable in the BIOS.)
-
Waccoon wrote:
Frankly, I've been regretting sticking with AMD ever since I bought it. If AMD doesn't get their act together, cap their cores, and start working on intelligent throttling like Intel, I'm jumping ship for good.
They have with the Opteron, and given the Danish? suit over crackable cores, seems like they'll be using it for the Athlon64 as well... especially since the first A64s will be in the Opteron pinout (with a pin snipped for whatever reason). Meanwhile, throttling/safety-shutoff is available, it's just that mainboard makers are responsible for implementing the appropriate reaction to output from the thermal sensor included in recent cores; it's supposed to be enough to save your butt if your fan fails. Everything I've read says the Opteron's (rather low) dissipation numbers are much more 'worst case' than prior figures, and perhaps lower than the competing Intel chips', but AMD does want the board/system builders to leave room for any future faster, hotter chips.
Which chip are you running? You have to keep track whenever you go shopping, be it AMD or Intel; whenever any company makes the final push for an old core or process, the dissipations go to hell (and admittedly, AMD's been there for a while, but I gather Barton? was much improved, at least at the initial speeds.) ... admittedly, AMD's been in that unsavory position for the past year, given the delays on x86-64. Looks like dissipations on the recent 32-bit ("consumer") chips are hovering around 50-60W nominal, with 70-something peak. A look at the latest P4s shows the 2A at 52W/68W peak, on up to 82W/70W peak??? for the 3.20C; admittedly, "Thermal Design Power" has some sort of different meaning in that camp. I have no idea if those are dogs or not, as I don't follow Intel, but it doesn't look too pretty. Thing to remember is, the AMDs are designed to tolerate some heat -- as long as it's below the maximum, there's no reason to freak out over getting to down to 30 or 40C. I'd cough up the current number, but I don't feel like re-retrieving the PDF, ugh.
For those who asked:
Athlon XP Datasheets (http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_739_3748,00.html) -- Yes, you want the real datasheets; the thermal info is buried in section 7.1ish in them. Durons and Opterons are linked from that page, over on the right.
Intel's P4 Datasheets (http://intel.com/design/Pentium4/datashts/index.htm?iid=ipp_dlc_procp4p+prod_datasheet&) are over here. Section 5.1ish.
Meanwhile, if the P4 is ever throttling during normal use, you've got problems there. Both companies keep shoving out Wunderchips somewhat impractical for normal use (a problem not limited to CPUs anymore, given the first GeForce FXen)... I'd suggest hanging behind the pack, picking off the 'sweet spots' once they hit the $50-$150 mark, depending on application. (Of course, my last personal investment was my venerable 850, and keeping the upgrade path open is harder when courting Our Lady Intel of the Hundred Sockets.)
Best advice, even if I'll get flamed? Examine your needs closely (as in: stop shooting for 30C), and try a vendor other than Thermaltake for a while. They're the Abit of the cooling world, much loved for no apparent reason... and meanwhile, some Reg or Inq article pointed out that AMD are making their retail heatsinks suck less.
-
Nope. These were fan/heatsink combos. No peltier coolers to be seen. The boxes for the particular ones were simple "generic" Taiwanese cardboard boxes with no mention of Peltier cooling. Although he did have some of those, IIRC.
It is physically impossible for a heatsink/fan combo to cool anything lower that the ambient temperature around it because it's based on radiating the heat to the surrounding air. The fan is only there to move the heated air away from the heatsink and doesn't do any active cooling. So this must have been a scam since you say that they weren't peltiers or any other such cooling.