AM2 Athlon 3800+ - any advice on a heatsink?

Crossbuster · Post by **Crossbuster** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 5:55 am

Hey there everyone, you've been very helpful in the past, so I'm going to ask you all again.

My girlfriend wants a nice little gaming PC to play Phantasy Star Universe and Battlefield 2/2142 on, but she'd like it quite cheap. As most of us know, cheap and quiet don't normally go together, but I've been trying to factor in quietness in choosing her components, and so far I have:

Athlon 64 3800+ (AM2 - TDP 62W)
Passive MSI GeForce 7600GT
250Gb Samsung Spinpoint HDD (which I'll suspend for her)
Motherboard with passive north/southbridges, and 1gb DDR2 PC5400.
Her current PC is in an Antec 3000B which I gave her, and I modded her PSU with a spare antec tri-cool, which doesn't make much noise.

My question is, after reading the review of the Arctic Cooling Alpine HSF, which keeps a CPU with a TDP of 84W at 40 degrees above ambient while running at 7v, will this be a good low-cost, reasonably low noise (she's not as fussy as I am about computer noise...) option for keeping this CPU cool?

Any comments and suggestions are more than welcome.

Many thanks

- Marc

autoboy · Post by **autoboy** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 8:14 am

Yes. It works pretty well. May not be totally silent under load but if you turn on fan control it will be quiet at idle and pretty quiet at load.

theyangster · Post by **theyangster** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 8:33 am

if you can afford it, try and go for a ATI 1950 pro, you might get a little more value out of it in the long term. According to reviews, it is very quiet
bit-tech review

Crossbuster · Post by **Crossbuster** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 11:06 am

The 1950 Pro is two or three times the price of the 7600GT...

But thanks for the advice

Mariner · Post by **Mariner** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 11:20 am

Crossbuster wrote:The 1950 Pro is two or three times the price of the 7600GT...

But thanks for the advice

Actually the 1950 Pro is around 60% more expensive than the 7600GT - or at least it is here in the UK. Nothing like 2-3 times the price but you are right that the two chips are in totally different price brackets. The 1950 Pro is a lot faster than the 7600GT but then it wants to be considering it is a lot more expensive!

As regards the Alpine cooler, I'd have thought that it should be good enough for your requirements as it seems a decent heatsink. If the motherboard supports it, you may want to consider undervolting the CPU a little as well to reduce the heat it emits.

jackylman · Post by **jackylman** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 11:53 am

Mariner wrote:If the motherboard supports it, you may want to consider undervolting the CPU a little as well to reduce the heat it emits.

A little? How about undervolting the heck out of it?

My AM2 Athlon 3500 can run at stock speed (2.2GHz) @ 1.150V and idles at 1GHz @ 0.9V with CrystalCPUID. Even when I ran Prime95 for several hours, the CPU core never got over 40C. That was with the stock cooler (with Arctic Silver 5) at 50% fan speed, where I couldn't hear it over the hard disk (suspended WD 2500KS).

For a cheap mobo, I'd suggest the MSI K9NU. The chipset is passively cooled and it has a very tweakable fan management feature in the BIOS.

What hard disk are you going to be using? Like I said, that'll probably be the loudest component.

Crossbuster · Post by **Crossbuster** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 1:58 pm

The motherboard I'll be using is the MSI K9NGM, and the hard drive is a SATA2 250Gb Samsung Spinpoint (SP2504C.)

Would undervolting it be a safe option if I'm giving it to someone who isn't the most knowledgable person regarding computers (at least not when it comes to things like undervolting.) if I won't be there to check up on it for three or four weeks at a time?

Mariner · Post by **Mariner** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 2:12 pm

Crossbuster wrote:Would undervolting it be a safe option if I'm giving it to someone who isn't the most knowledgable person regarding computers (at least not when it comes to things like undervolting.) if I won't be there to check up on it for three or four weeks at a time?

If you do a fair bit of testing to check the system is running fine at the specified voltage (i.e. run a couple of instances of Prime95 for half a day or so!) I wouldn't have thought that there would be any problem. Thinking back, when I undervolted in the past I don't think I ever needed to adjust the BIOS settings once the PC was up and running fine.

My current PC is total crap so undervolting and silencing isn't really much of an option!