Passive cooling P!!! 733Mhz ?

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Valdis

Valdis

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Apr 30, 2007
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i want to know how easy or hard is to make the cpu run without fan but heatsink only. i have spare AMD cooler for Athlon x2 am2. if i put that on without fan somehow would that be sufficient? oh and advices on a silent psu? need only 250 or maybe less for the old atx that was with pentium 3. *making a media pc*
 
why don't you go new system? get something like the thermalright ultra 120, with an e4300@1200mhz, and an hd2600xt passive? fast and cool.pitty the 2600 isnt out yet
 
ahh, ok, well i'd say if you could get that x2 HSF to mount properly get good contact ext it would be great, i had some old hp pos that ran a passive 850 on a hsf similar to that
 
I used to run a Celeron 533 (Coppermine) fanless with an Orb cooler back in the day but that was with the Vcore reduced in the BIOS. I tried the same trick with Pentium 3 667 but it ran too hot. The Orb is a basic heatsink by today’s standards so a half decent modern heatsink will handle it fine.
If you’re on a tight budget try something like a Scythe Katana as that supports S370. If it doesn’t work fanless then use the fan and set the RPM to 5V or so at which point you will not hear it. I used a Katana with a Core 2 Duo with the fan at low speed and it had no problem cooling it. Katana details here:
http://www.scythe-usa.com/product/cpu/012/scktn_detail.html

If your BIOS allows under-volting then try that as well; not many S370 boards allow that.

I have a Silverstone ST30NF which is a nice 300W fanless power supply: http://www.silverstonetek.com/products/p_contents.php?pno=st30nf&area=usa
 
i want to know how easy or hard is to make the cpu run without fan but heatsink only. i have spare AMD cooler for Athlon x2 am2. if i put that on without fan somehow would that be sufficient? oh and advices on a silent psu? need only 250 or maybe less for the old atx that was with pentium 3. *making a media pc*
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You can do it even with some existing hardware but these points are to be considered:
-You have to mod the AMD heatsink to fit a P3 socket
-To work properly it has to be at least one of the copper-finned or better the heatpipe AMD heatsink because the plain aluminum one is the worst you can get.
-The case would better be a Micro ATX mini tower for best efficiency
-Place a good 120mm fan at the rear of your case and extend a duct to fit the heatsink so you can absorb all the hot air away efficiently
-look for the socket 370 vcore mods to drop the voltage.
-look for a fanless PSU; I have seen some with large cooling fins extending outside.
...Anyway, a $26 Socket 754 Sempron 3000+ locked to 800-1000mhz and undervolted to 1.1V comfortably from windows with RMClock will:
-run cooler
-perform better
-require cheaper DDR compared to SDR RAM
-not require you to mod the cooler you already have
 
Once upon a time a had a coppermine (733) that I had ran passively inadvertently. One day I popped it open to replace the HD and found my non functioning cpu fan. The processor had been running fine. I was heavy into BF1942 at the time and would have noticed any throttling.
My point is that it can't be too hard to do.
 
Once upon a time a had a coppermine (733) that I had ran passively inadvertently. One day I popped it open to replace the HD and found my non functioning cpu fan. The processor had been running fine. I was heavy into BF1942 at the time and would have noticed any throttling. My point is that it can't be too hard to do.
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I think you’re missing the point here, we know it’s not hard to do; it’s more a matter of what’s the minimum spec heatsink that it requires.
I’ve passively cooled a C2D @ 2.4GHz so a coppermine with its large die and low TDP is relatively trivial.
 
OK, what heatsink were you using?
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Stock? That was many moons,(computers) ago.
Does that mean you don't remember?

If you weren't using the stock cooler then it invalidates your premise.

BTW, I don't think coppermine supported thermal throttling, I think that came in with the P4.
 
It was stock. I just don't recall exactly what it looked like. I don't know if there were different stock coolers. I do know I never upgraded it from the stock cooler.
 
It was stock.
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You managed better than I did although it may be that I was put off by Intel’s published figures for max temps and I could have pushed it more. In those pre thermal throttling days I was more conservative.
Do you remember if you used a case fan? That would have helped and I didn’t start using those until my first P4.
 
You got me curious so after digging through a pile of computer case boxes etc. I found the old guy (never threw it out). I had one intake fan and the power supply actually overlapped the cpu socket area. It's 80mm fan would have been pulling some air from right over the cpu heat sink before exhausting.
 
Well Dell always used passive cooling on the P3's but they ducted case sides funneling in air to the heatsink and the heatsinks were 2-3 times the size of a X2 heatsink. I really dont think it would be sufficient.
Why not use a fan??
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they still passively cool the x2s in the dimensions
 
You got me curious so after digging through a pile of computer case boxes etc. I found the old guy (never threw it out). I had one intake fan and the power supply actually overlapped the cpu socket area. It's 80mm fan would have been pulling some air from right over the cpu heat sink before exhausting.
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I’d almost forgotten about power supplies that overlap the CPU; that must have helped. From your experience it sounds worth a go, although I just remembered that the OP also asked about a fanless power supply so he may need to use a case fan. In which case I suggest using a 120mm case fan as they can be very quiet.

Personally I think that fanless cooling is over rated as if you use low noise fans, ducting and under-volt the CPU and fans you’ll get a better solution. I’ve been building very low noise systems for 7 or 8 years now and hard drives are the hardest think to manage; I can’t wait for cheap flash drives. 😀
 
A P3 733 at stock voltage with the stock heatsink can idle in windows w/ACPI-HALT-Cooling all day long without a fan, as it's roughly 8W.

Full load is a different story. You don't need a giant heatsink (and frankly I'd be careful with on, since trying to strap a modern giant sized sink onto the socket 370 lugs is likely to result in it not making good contact, or it would have to be stapped down so tightly that it was a risk of cracking the naked P3 core.

You don't need a copper or copper bottomed heatsink, the P3 does not have high enough thermal density for it to matter at 733MHz and stock or lower vcore. The heatsink limitation is the basic fin conductivity and fin surface area. You'll want a 'sink with a lot of tall widely spaced tines and/or ideally a duct attached to either the PSU intake or the case exhaust.

Do you really need this passive? You can get a no-frills all aluminum socket A heatsink wearing a 80x25mm fan for about $6. Undervolt that fan so it runs at 5V or about 400-1000 RPM and it will live long and do so silently, with minimal dust buildup since it is such a low airflow rate.

As others mentioned lowering the vcore is a good thing to try. Depends on which coppermine stepping it is, how low you'd be likely able to go. "Some" of the mid to later steppings could do 733MHz at around 1.35-1.4V, and AFAIK none of them required as much as 1.6V to run stabily at a mere 733MHz.

However, we haven't even addressed the purpose of the system. For some uses even a P3 733 would be overkill and could be downclocked to 550MHz or even lower without any real penalty. For example one of my oldest fileservers does RAID and GbE and still has a Celeron 500 in it. It's not CPU limited, never peaks above 70% utilization and even that only for fractions of a second at a time. IOW, if you can underclock it, you can undervolt even more.

P3 did have thermal shutdown integral. I suggest you set it up, fire up CPUBurn or Prime95's Torture test and touch-test the heatsink to see how hot it is. If you can leave your fingers on for a few seconds it's cool enough (obviously Prime95 shouldn't err either).
 
I’ve been building very low noise systems for 7 or 8 years now and hard drives are the hardest think to manage; I can’t wait for cheap flash drives. 😀
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Sorry for going off topic but now you've hit something I've given a lot of thought to.

My antec case is by no means a quiet system but still the hard drives are the loudest components. I'm coveting two ssd's in raid 0. I'm hoping the combination of Raid 0 and ssd access time will perform well. I've decided that when I can buy two 64gig sata ssd's for a total cost of 1000 CDN inc. tax I'm in. I know that bigger cheaper ones will come out soon after but I've picked that as my commit point. If they get faster sooner maybe I'll commit one drive at a time.
 
I’ve been building very low noise systems for 7 or 8 years now and hard drives are the hardest think to manage; I can’t wait for cheap flash drives. 😀
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My antec case is by no means a quiet system but still the hard drives are the loudest components.
If you only need 1 or 2 drives then you can make it very very close to silent now and there’s no need to wait for SSDs.
To start with you need to choose a drive that is inherently quiet and engage its Acoustic Management features if you are looking for the lowest possible noise. Samsung and Western Digital typically have the quietest drives; check www.silentpcreview.com for details.
I use an Antec P180/182 and it’s very well designed for low noise computing with a bit of tweaking. Just focussing on the hard drive situation these are the two solutions that have worked for me.

1. Remove the drive bay in the lower chamber and place a foam sheet on the floor of this chamber and rest your drive on it. Replace the Antec fan in the lower chamber with a Nexus 120mm fan and lower the speed to ~600 RPM.

2. Remove the drive cage in the main chamber of the case. Place a foam sheet on the floor of this chamber and sit your drive on top of it. I actually place my drive in a very basic metal hard drive cooler and sit this on top of the foam. The cooler is basically a thin metal sheet that covers the bottom and sides of the drive and hardly helps the temperature. It does though create a useful means by which I can easily attach an 80mm fan to cool the drive. I slide the drive forward so that part of the cooler is exposed and attach the fan to the free part of the cooler; I’m using elastic bands to hold it in place. I under-volt the Nexus fan to 5V or so and it easily cools the drive; it’s a 400GB Samsung and its temperature is never more than 30/31 Centigrade. Without the fan the temperature can easily climb to 50C I remember. With the fan being so close it doesn’t need to move much air to significantly reduce the temperature.
 
I can't imagine it'd be that hard to run of those passively, my old p4 2.66 ran passively, my friend now has that system and it still runs fine and at acceptable temps, and my athlon 64 3500+ is running passively right now at 52c at about 75% load as i type this.

Just make sure you have good case cooling, and I'm not sure how you're gonna mod that heatsink to fit on a p3 though :?
 
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