Better Cooling AMD 64 3400+

[moonwitch1405241479 0]

Well, I am by no means a hardware wiz, I have assembled computers before, but never replaced the cooling, so I have little idea what to do or how to do it.

 

First of all, I have an AMD 64 3400+ with the standard AMD cooler, my mother board is an MSI K8N Neo Platinum, I think that's all yall need to know.

 

The biggest issue is that my room is not a cool room, so the CPU on the warmer days runs at 60°C - which I feel is far too hot. I also think my case is not aiding the cooling. It's a case with a windtunnel thing in it, but the placement of the tunnel is actually too far off to the back of the case and too high (compared to the location of the actual CPU).

 

Needless to say, with this in mind, I do have several questions.

Which cooler meets both my need to keep the CPU cool and keep it fairly quiet.

How do I replace it LOL I mean, I know I have to take the old one off, but the thermal compound, that will also cover the CPU, do I need to remove it? How do I best do that? And which compound to use? Or does it come with the cooler?

And if needed to aide this issue, any recommendations on towers?

[wutske 0]

The best coolers you can get are the Thermalright XP120, XP90, SI97 and SI120, you can choose the fan yourself, so you take a large (120mm) and quiet fan.

I also suggest you to check out this site, it has a few heatsink roundups under the Cooling Air cat.

 

About the thermal pad, remove the crap. Boxed cooler thermal pads are bad. The best thing you can get is some Arctic Silver or some OCZ thermal paste.

Here is a good instruction how you should apply tim (thermal interface material).

Most good heatsink companies ship their heatsinks with some thermal compounds, it sometimes it ships with cheap stuff, but it'll do the job just fine.

 

For your case, make shure you have intake and outtake fans, so that i/o flow is balanced (no under or over pressure in your case). Most cases have place for an intake in the front bottom and and outtake in the back at cpu level.

 

Hope this helped a bit.

[sm0k3ymcl3ud 0]

Well, I am by no means a hardware wiz, I have assembled computers before, but never replaced the cooling, so I have little idea what to do or how to do it.

 

First of all, I have an AMD 64 3400+ with the standard AMD cooler, my mother board is an MSI K8N Neo Platinum, I think that's all yall need to know.

 

The biggest issue is that my room is not a cool room, so the CPU on the warmer days runs at 60°C - which I feel is far too hot.  I also think my case is not aiding the cooling. It's a case with a windtunnel thing in it, but the placement of the tunnel is actually too far off to the back of the case and too high (compared to the location of the actual CPU).

 

Needless to say, with this in mind, I do have several questions.

Which cooler meets both my need to keep the CPU cool and keep it fairly quiet.

 

How do I replace it LOL I mean, I know I have to take the old one off, but the thermal compound, that will also cover the CPU, do I need to remove it? How do I best do that? And which compound to use? Or does it come with the cooler?

 

And if needed to aide this issue, any recommendations on towers?

1064323409[/snapback]

I would look into getting a Peltier cooler, if you have a high wattage power supply. These things draw a lot of power, but they do a great job when combined with a heatsink and a fan. Basically what it is is two metal plates with a chemical compound in between them sealed with epoxy, and one of the plates is a positive and the other is a negative, when you pass electricity through the compound in the middle one plate gets very cold and the other gets very hot. It basically aids in pulling heat away from the CPU and ensures that your CPU is always kept cool. What you do is using thermal paste, apply the cooling plate directly on top of the cpu and then using more thermal paste, apply the heatsink and fan on top of the cooling plate, then you hook the cooling plate up to the power supply using one of your free power connections and your ready to go. Your CPU should stay about 30 to 40 degrees with this cooling unit in place.

 

Hope this helps.

 

 

--------------------

Sm0k3y Mcl3uD

[IWroteCode 0]

Just for general reference, i would look into this site:
http://www.frozencpu.com/

They have tons of cooling solutions. Fans, water cooling, and also upgraded heatisinks. I actually know the owner personally. If you have any questions, their phone # is on the botton of the page. They are very nice people and will help you to figure out what kind of cooling would work best for you.

[jipman 0]

Peltier coolers are off the hook, those things are bloody expensive.

 

Knowing you I'd stick to normal air cooling because those coolers are the easiest to install and they give a good performance.

 

There are are a few quite popular brands these days, here's two I know some stuff about:

 

zalman

 

Zalman has very good coolers that do a good job in keeping the lot quiet and cool. The con of this is that Zalman is pretty expensive, the cheapest one around is about €25.

 

Since I have a Zalman of my own, i can say that the cooling is quite adequate, formerly my Pentium 4 was around the 60 degrees, after the zalman it lowered about 10 degrees to 50.

 

arctic cooling

 

Then there is arctic, normal arctic's are usually around the €10 with some supermodels that are around €20. They are more silent than Zalman's because of their lower fanspeeds. If I am correct their cooling performance is about the same as zalmans

 

For silence either of these two brands should do the trick (of course cooling is ok too).

 

About installation.

 

Most coolers are kept on their place with 2 clips/thumb/screws. Opening them up is not really a big issue. However, lifting the Cooler is and one should be carefull not to drop the cooler on the cpu (I don't think it will like that).

 

After removing the cooler, best thing to do is remove the cpu as well and scrape/rub off the residue of the cooling stuff paste thingy (doing so will increase cooling capacity abit).

 

Since the cpu is already out you can apply the new coolingstuff (usually comes with the cooler) on it.

 

After that, put it back and now comes the time to install the new cooler. This can be tricky and you have to watch out not to damage anything.

 

ps. Zalman coolers are quite large and therefor difficult to place

 

Conclusion

 

I'd buy an Arctic. They're cheaper, perform great and are silent.

[heimdall99 0]

what about liquid cooling options? I heard they give good performance and naturally super quiet, but thinking a risk of a line break might be too high. Does anyone have any experience with those?

[jipman 0]

Liquid Cooling requires reasonable amount of maintaining, refilling the liquid, checking for leaks and stuff. Also, super quiet is an overstatement, the radiator for the thing has fans in them, so basically you MOVE the source of the sound rather than REmoving it.Also, installing liquid cooling is quite more troublesome and difficult than any normal air cooler.

[qwijibow 0]

Here was an interesting trick i used for my Amd64 3400+by adding extra case fans, you cool the air inside the case, and theCPU fan can work more effectivly.BUT case ans are noisey... so here is what i did... I added 4 case fans, but undervolted them all.4 fans running at half speed are completely silent, but work as effectivly as 2 or 3 full speed fans. and a case fan only costs £2 ish.Here is what to do...Put as many fans into the case as you can / want.Now wire them as follows...All the red wires of the case fans to a red wire from the power supply.All the plack wires from the case fans to the black of the power supply.and leave the white case fan wires un-attached.The fans are resigned to run from 12 volts (the yellow wire) but the red wire is only 5 volts.Its cheap. and effective.In the summer, (i live in england, not the hottest of places)it lowered by amd 3400+ cpu temp from 55 degrees under high stress, down to 45 degrees under stress.Not a huge differance, but easy and very cheap. Especially if you can find the fans from spare parts. (the fans on the inside of power supply's are usually exactly the same as normal case fans.Just be sure to use insulation tape around any soldered power supply wires.. IDEALLY, use a junction box.

[unimatrix 0]

We've reached a point in computing where heat all around is becoming the greatest problem in systems today. Between the CPU's, high performance GPU's, and high performance RAM systems today put out more heat than ever before. Before only higher end servers generated the same amounts of heat. Also, case form factors are getting smaller which only compound the problem. I started having heat issues with the 1.2 Ghz AMD Althon thunderbird series of chips. I had a standard Mid-tower ATX case and added two PCI slot fans to suck out enough air to keep the system reasonable stable. Drilling holes in the side of the case and adding and machining out additional 80mm case fan on one side panel also helped a buch too with air flow. People wanting to build their own high performance machines and that aren't going to be moving them much and have the room, I recommend starting with a full tower case with as many fans as you can get. I'm pretty much out of touch with the PC side of things (work around Macs all the time now) so not sure how many manufactures are making said cases these days. Some useful tips:Use a good heat sink with good thermo paste, not the cheap stuff. Get as much air flow in your case as you can. Unless you spent a bunch of money on your case, a cordless drill and a sheet metal bit can do wonders in creating passive cooling.Take the side off and get a box fan and have it pointed at the open side. I've known a few people that's done this. Box fans are cheap, a little noisy, but move a lot of air onto the opened case. (box fans as in the box fans you box for your house)One move Intel is making I'm taking keen interest in and that's increasing performance per watt. Less power is great in laptops, but the more power, the more heat too, so one should see an increase in performance with such an increase in heat generated.

[wutske 0]

Few names, look for some reviews:Vapochill MicroAcrtic Cooling Freezer 64One thing I'd like to say; DO NOT COMBINE A PELT W/ AIR COOLING, you'll frie your cpu. You'll need a 226w pelt (at minimum to get good results), add an 80w for the cpu and you have nearly 300w that you have to cool, nearly impossible to do this w/ some turbine .Watercooling is a good solution and nowadays you have those easy (but not realy too good performing kist compared to ...). Just search a bit on the net for watercooling kits.

[Retaining 0]

Just a side note, the maximum safe temperature for your processor is 70 degrees C, according to http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/. You might still want to look for a better cooler, but you're not in danger of frying your CPU as you type or anything right now. I just used the stock AMD cooler with some Arctic Silver and my CPU has never gone above 60 degrees, even when running processor-intensive applications for hours on end. However, I do have several extra case fans arranged so air comes in the front and top and goes out the back of the case, which makes a big difference in overall temperature for both the CPU and the motherboard (don't want to kill your chipset either!). If you decide not to get a cooler, try adding some case fans and improving ventilation in your case, it might help.