Hi. :] I currently have a socket 939 AMD Athlon 64 x2 Dual Core 4200+ (@2.21ghz) And I cannot afford at the moment to make any upgrades (Plus in order to upgrade I would require a new mobo / ram / etc.) I'd like to replace the stock heatsink / fan from my current setup and use something that does a much better job at cooling because I'm planning to try and over-clock it to 2.6ghz or possibly higher (Most likely 2.6 though). I was looking at the Thermaltake RX K8 Silent Booster - Is this a good choice or are there better products? I'm roughly new to the aspect of cooling, and have always used stock (Except for my chipset fan, had to replace it with a new one), and would this help lower temperatures to allow the over-clocking to 2.6ghz? I don't want to go too far and I don't know if a fan can handle .4ghz of overclocking. I'm planning also on using Arctic Silver - 5, is this a good choice for Thermal paste? Thank you so much for the advice.
Hi! I had the exact same cpu (still ticking in my parents puter) a while back. I had it running @2.7GHz on the stock heatsink for a while. It took a helluva beating hitting 85°C . Anyway, putting a decent heatpipe based cooler on it dropped the load temps a whopping 40°C! I even went for a 3GHz oveclock, it was stable under xp but 64 bit os'es didnt like it and crashed. Anyway, I'd advise you to get a heatpipe based heatsink as those perform best for not much money. Now about AS5, I bought a tube in hopes of getting lower temps on another rig (compared to scythe's paste that came with the heatsink) and I had no better results. Re-applied 3 times to make sure I did everything right, but the temps were the same as with the other goo(even months afterwards). So, don't be scared to oc, just get propper cooling and make sure the case is ventilated and read the sticky about AMD overclocking here as it applies to your rig too. GL HF!
Yeah 85c - whatever. Thermal shutdown kicks in over 72c. My 3800 was overclocked to 2550Mhz and it only ran around 30c.
The "ZALMAN CNPS7000C-Cu", and "ZALMAN CNPS 7500 AlCu" are both good. Each are pretty quiet and support socket 939. Only difference is the CNPS7000C-Cu's heatsink material is pure copper, so it'll handle temps a bit better. Great choice for paste, I personally use Antec Silver Formula 5, it's basically the same thing, but for some reason I've had better results with the Antec brand as opposed to Arctic's silver 5.
Thanks for the advice. I'd love to be able to hit 2.8ghz, that's the primary goal. I'm just a little rough on over-clocking and am a little paranoid about it atm, especially with stock. I was messing around and was running 2.4ghz (+0.2ghz) completely stable, but I was hitting 65c (but apparently I had the same temps on 2.2ghz.)
Actually, this is not true. My current CPU (Profile) hit +90ºC once after applying some thermal paste incorrectly and only then it shut down.
How about a nice, cheap cooler? Sunbeam core contact freezer http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...m_core_contact_freezer-_-35-207-004-_-Product I've had great luck with mine. One plus is that it comes with tx-2 thermal compound. I feel that stuff has been better than AS5.
Just try not to exceed 65C under load. I once had it running at about 72C, it did not shut down automatically and just kept on rendering so I manually interrupted the process to allow it to cool.
