Hi, I'm putting the final touches on designing a new system... the K6-III+ just isn't cutting it anymore.
The motherboard will be a Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra-9, the processor and AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and the case a Sonata II (quietness is one of the design goals). I was initially thinking I'd use a Zalman CNPS-7700 because of its good performance, quietness, and it's ability to cool other areas of the system - a plus as the motherboard uses only a passive heatsink on the northbridge and the mosfets have no cooling. However, I've recently looked at the CNPS9500 and one supposedly gains more thermal efficiency and quieter performance at the loss of cooling other parts of the system (I imagine).
I was wondering if anyone had any advice about using one or the other of these heat sinks. Also, if anyone knew whether either of them would benefit from the Sonata II's heat duct thingie would be helpful.
Thanks.
-Joe
P.S. It's gonna be quite sad retiring my "Zorro 2000". Sniff. This baby still has 2 ISA slots, and slots for both SDRAM and EDO! (It was the ASRock Dual of its day, a great transition board). It was also the first computer in the known universe to have IDE RAID, thanks to a freaky little gizmo that sat in an open 3.5" bay. Also ignored every expert's advice to go with a Zip drive, feeling that "these new-fangled rewriteable CDs" were going to be the new floppy disks and went for a burner. Had the world's first and only external modem with built-in speakerphone... used the first scanner in existence with dedicated scan/copy/etc buttons... Maybe I should donate her to the Smithsonian....
The motherboard will be a Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra-9, the processor and AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and the case a Sonata II (quietness is one of the design goals). I was initially thinking I'd use a Zalman CNPS-7700 because of its good performance, quietness, and it's ability to cool other areas of the system - a plus as the motherboard uses only a passive heatsink on the northbridge and the mosfets have no cooling. However, I've recently looked at the CNPS9500 and one supposedly gains more thermal efficiency and quieter performance at the loss of cooling other parts of the system (I imagine).
I was wondering if anyone had any advice about using one or the other of these heat sinks. Also, if anyone knew whether either of them would benefit from the Sonata II's heat duct thingie would be helpful.
Thanks.
-Joe
P.S. It's gonna be quite sad retiring my "Zorro 2000". Sniff. This baby still has 2 ISA slots, and slots for both SDRAM and EDO! (It was the ASRock Dual of its day, a great transition board). It was also the first computer in the known universe to have IDE RAID, thanks to a freaky little gizmo that sat in an open 3.5" bay. Also ignored every expert's advice to go with a Zip drive, feeling that "these new-fangled rewriteable CDs" were going to be the new floppy disks and went for a burner. Had the world's first and only external modem with built-in speakerphone... used the first scanner in existence with dedicated scan/copy/etc buttons... Maybe I should donate her to the Smithsonian....