Quote:
Originally Posted by djbass
On the contrary, AMD CPU's typically run hotter than Intel ones.
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You're behind the times I'm afraid.
In fact, trying to acheive passive cooling on a current generation P4 is a roundabout route to burning your money - you buy the processor and burn that instead.
P4s put out well over 100W, whereas Athlon 64s are around the 60W mark and much lower when not doing anything if you have Cool'n'Quiet turned on. It underclocks the processor to around 50% and also reduces the voltage from ~1.3 to ~1.0. As Power = VI, the power drops due to the decreased amp load from underclocking (the I part) and then drops further due to the decreased voltage (the V part).
Anyway, the net result is that my Athlon64 3000+ idles along at about 45C in a very compact case, packed with other things (powerful graphics card, 3 harddrives which produce a fair amount of heat themselves, etc etc) and the case is made even hotter because the inside is covered in sound insulating foam, which also keeps the heat in. The 120mm fan on the cooler turns at an inaudible 700 RPM. At load it sits at about 55C and the fan ramps up to about 1000 RPM.
If I was to try a similar setup with a P4 I very much doubt I'd be able to keep the temperatures to within any safe level.
The other thing to consider is that not only does the Athlon 64 beat the equivilant P4 at most benchmarks, it costs less on a £/performance scale than the P4 does and you're also buying a degree of futureproofing with the 64bit part, which is STILL missing from the majority of the P4 lineup.
Intel execs have even taken the somewhat unusual step of admitting that their company missed the boat on both 64bit extensions and dual core processors, and are now about a year behind AMD in terms of the technology they are offering. In addition engineers at Intel have, in unofficial channels, warned against the current dual core offerings from Intel as they are "a rush job" and "inefficient".
Not to mention the job of trying to cool TWO 100W P4 cores on a single chip...