The Geeky Junkyard of kingler

My first impression of the Pentium D CPU is “wow, this is HOT!”

Literally I mean it. With the stock heatsink and fan (HS&F) , the CPU is running at 57 degree Celsius at idle! My previous Pentium 4 only goes up to 45 even at full load (with a Zalman HS&F).

I was scared by this high CPU temperature and did a google search right away. All I found is that everyone is complaining about that. Man, that’s why Intel made the Core 2 Duo chips, which consumes 40% less energy and yet performs 40% faster!

Anyway, I decided to get an aftermarket CPU HS&F and found this Cooler Master one. It is not as big as some popular ones, so I can easily fit it in the Antec case with the cool air intake tube attached.

The inital temperature drop was about 8 degrees at 49 degree at idle and 54 at full load. By pressing the heatsink several times after installing a new hard drive, magically the temperature dropped another 6 degrees to 43 idle. The reason I think comes from the thermal grease pre-applied on this heatsink. I suspect that if I change it to something better, the temperature would drop even more.

I heard a 10 degree drop in CPU temperature will double the CPU’s time span, so the investment in a good heatsink and fan is well worth it.

Talking about hot, I just found out that my PowerMac G5 CPUs are running at 85 degrees most of the time! Think about this, it is with liquid cooling! You can definitely boil eggs on them!

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 19th, 2006 at 10:08 am and is filed under SiteNews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.