Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset

Posted May 11, 2007 23:07 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

These things were originally designed for passive cooling and are just very massive. Suprisingly they aren't not heavy, you don't have to worry about the weight of the thing tweaking heatsink mounts or anything like that.

I have one on my 2.8ghz dual core Pentium-D proccessor. Pentium-Ds are infamous for being a very hot CPU, essentially being 2 Pentium4 cores.

I made a small duct for it out of stiff paper going back to the rear exhaust fan, which is a 800rpm 120mm fan. Then directly above the cpu I have the intake for the powersupply, which is another slow 120mm fan.

Those two fans are the only fans on my system and they keep my cpu ticking at barely above room tempurature. It's just amazing how efficient these heatpipe heatsinks can be.

The only serious problem is that you need to make sure that adiquate cooling is aviable for the big power conditioners/transistors typically found close to the cpu socket. If you overclock these will get very hot without air directly blowing down on them like you find a traditional cpu heatsink. Small aluminum heatsinks with thermal epoxy are more then adiquate to take care of that.

but I don't overclock so it's a non-issue.

that's another thing I like a lot about the onboard video: No need for a VGA card fan. This does wonders for making things quieter.

My old Dell 600mhz firewall hidden in the closet makes more noise through the door then my desktop currently does when running full-tilt.