And, are you serious that your AMD retail fan is LOUD with Cool 'n Quiet + Q-fan?

Mine is almost dead silent at 1200 RPM. Are you sure Q-fan is working?

You can also force it to work at a lower speed by raising the Q-fan target temperature in the BIOS.

What I mean by "tricky" is that it comes with these two metal arms, and has two "tracks" that you install them into. http://img323.imageshack.us/img323/6793/hskzal47j5ip.jpg This is more difficult to install than other Zalman heatsinks because you have to size them to fit your motherboard. Thus, you...

Got myself a pretty solid upgrade last month: Antec Sonata II (was going to get a P150, until I saw the issues with the powersupply and Asus boards) Asus A8N5X (VERY cheap, but VERY loud) X2 3800+ w/retail cooler 2GB Corsair XMS XFX 7900 GT The system performed perfectly out of the box, and performa...

I just recently upgraded to an Asus A8N5X. After some modifications, it is an excellent board for an excellent price (less than 80 bucks!). The good: * VERY cheap nForce 4 board The bad: * 6000 RPM screamer cooling the chipset * Because of the low price, only the CPU fan has Q-fan support. ASUS has ...

All I can tell you is: DO NOT purchase an ASUS motherboard, they do not play nicely with early model NeoHE 430 supplies.

Motherboard makers should make all motherboards passive, it's obviously not impossible (or even very hard), and it means more silence and more reliability. Uh, you think running electrical components at higher operating temps improves reliability? Au contraire. What he means is most cheap high-spee...

The Zalman passive northbrige heatsink yields a 41C temperature at full-load (Prime + SuperPI + 3dmark 06), and 25C at idle, given a room temperature of 22C. That's as good as the active cooler with a 6000 RPM fan! It works so well, I'm surprised they're not mentioned more around here. If I search ...

Howdy folks, just got done installing my new system: Antec Sonata II (was going to get a P150, until I saw the issues with the powersupply + ASUS) Asus A8N5X X2 3800+ w/retail cooler 2GB Corsair XMS XFX 7900 GT The system performed perfectly out of the box, and performance was excellent, but I was d...

Just did a new system build: CPU Information (CPU #1): Standard CPUID: Family: F, Model: B, Stepping: 1 Extended CPUID: Family: F, Model: 2B, Stepping: 1 CPUID String: 20FB1 Processor APIC: 0 Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (Manchester) CPU Speed: 2015.05 (403.01 x 5.0) Revision: BH9-E4 Platform: ...

Just warning, new amd core - venice, san diego, manchester, toledo refuse to undervolt less than 1.1V. That's a VERY SERIOUS accusation with huge repercussions for all of us here at SPCR. The least you could do after making such a general sweeping statement is provide us a link. You sure it's not y...

Just warning, new amd core - venice, san diego, manchester, toledo refuse to undervolt less than 1.1V. That's a VERY SERIOUS accusation with huge repercussions for all of us here at SPCR. The least you could do after making such a general sweeping statement is provide us a link. You sure it's not y...

Ahh, but want to see what the C7 1.5 GHz buys you? Have a look here . You can read my post in the thread, but I will repeat it here: The C7 is no silver bullet for Via. It is a new rev of Nehemiah with double the L2 cache, a better bus interface, and SSE2. It doesn't change the fact that Nehemiah, l...

jaganath mentioned an AMD Geode. Where do I go about getting one of these?. You don't have to. All 0.09 micron Athlon 64 desktop chips can be cloocked down to 1.0 GHz and 1.1v, it is part of the Cool 'n Quiet spec. In fact, most of them can do 1.2-1.4 GHz at 1.0v, completely stable, see the Athlon ...

There's nothing fishy about the test with Conroe...Intel has finally built a P6 successor that completely obliterates other x86 processors on the market. Conroe is NOT the same processor as the Pentium M and Yonah (which are very similar). Conroe has a much beefier decoder pipe, with the ability to ...

The 0.09 micron desktop Athlon 64 Socket 939 chips use the same power at load as the Turion ML counterparts, they are basically the same chip. In fact, the 512k cache desktop processors will use a bit less power due to half the cache (SRAM cache at 2GHz is fairly power-hungry). Do not confuse these ...

Wow, check this out: I undervolted my Winchester 3200+ to 1.0v, and tested the highest clock I could push it to. I managed to get it up to 1.5 GHz, booting from BIOS at those settings. Finished SuperPI 32M while running Prime Torture. Best of all, I ran it PASSIVE with my Zalman 7000 AlCu, which was...

That voltage (1.075) isn't so low, just a sign of the times. Most 0.09 micron AMD desktop parts can run stock voltage at 1.2v, and many can go as low as 1v with a little underclocking. These will just be cherry-picked X2 processors, like the Turion MTs. I'm not surprised at all, this is a necessity....

I would consider 0.1V to be significant (for a silencer, at least), as it will increase power consumption / heat output of a processor with default 1.4V by ~12%. Yeah, it doesn't sound much but arguably the supply voltage is the most significant factor in determining how much heat a chip will produ...

DDR2 on AM2 will perform better by the time the platform is ready for retail release. The processor core isn't completely debugged yet, and the motherboard support is almost non-existant. Even if the performance improvement is not incredible, remember what AMD is getting out of DDR2: 1. Higher densi...

Yeah, I have to admit, I bought my Winchester core about a year ago just because it was much lower power at stock than anything else out there. But now that I've tinkered around with it, I'm amazed at what it can do in terms of low-voltage operation. From the looks of it, Venice is even better. Sock...

Oh, I plan on sticking around your site. I've been reading and enjoying your reviews for several months. Most of your methods and conclusions are reasonable. I was, however, so disappointed with this review, that I signed up for a forum account. Sure, you compare the Turion to a Pentium M, and that ...

This review doesn't really add anything to what is already common knowledge on the web. 1. The world already knew the Turions are cherry-picked undervolted desktop chips. The "PowerNow" support is simply a microcode change performed when the processors are speedbinned. 2. The world has known for som...