Pieter Hulshoff wrote:
On Friday 29 April 2005 06:30, Darryl Gregorash wrote:
All this talk of Athlons and heat makes me wonder if people on this list have forgotten that the Athlon is notorious, always has been, for the heat it produces. I don't know if you can get an AMD processor anymore that does not include a fan, and this is why.
How are the fans that come with a "boxed" CPU? Are they any good, or should they be tossed out the door asap?
I have no idea; I have never owned an Athlon. But if you were the CEO of AMD, what would you do? Put in a cheap fan that might not be worth anything, and risk having lots of CPUs returned because they failed in 3 or 6 months from excess heat? Or would you put in a fan that can do the job, and keep the failure rate down to an acceptable level? My best guess is the fans are the cheapest they can find that will still do the job, but you don't want that. As a fan ages, it will slow down, due to many reasons -- increased mechanical resistance from worn bearings or dirt, increased electrical resistance as the windings age, and so on. You want the CPU fan to last as long as you have the machine, not fail or become inadequate 2 or 3 years from now. Dude, you are talking about spending maybe 300 euros on a case, at least that much more on 4 new hard drives. Just go and spend the 10 or 20, or even 30, euros per fan it is going to cost you to get a decent fan, and call it insurance. Just remember that you want to move 1.5 cu.m per minute for each case and hard drive fan, and around 0.5 cu.m per minute for the CPU. Sealed bearing fans are best for all of them, if you can get them. Those will last longer, and will produce less noise. They also cost more, but even if you spend 100 euros on fans, I bet that is still less than one-fifth what you spent on a CPU and memory.