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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: NicoV who wrote (257536)	12/24/2008 8:46:34 PM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 275872

Re: Do you have a Watt meter to measure the idle power consumption? I'm at home, and don't have a watt meter here. So here's where it stands. The old chip was a 5600+ that had an old aluminum $11.95 thermaltake heatsink/fan (those 5600+ chips don't use any power - at least this one didn't). I'd originally had a thermaltake silent boost K8 - $24.95 at Frys - on it, taken from a previous box, but the fan died. I didn't think an aluminum $9.95 fan was suitable for a Phenom, and my wife is busy getting stuff ready (didn't mind if I worked on this), so I went out looking for a nice cooler for the new chip. I came home with a 2600R, which had gotten great reviews but looked like it might not fit in the case, so I also picked up a new 92mm fan ($7.95 - what the heck) just in case. Once I pulled the old heat sink off and measured clearances, it was clear there was no point in even opening the box for the 2600R - no way it would fit in the case (a small mid-tower). So I used the old "Silent Boost" with a new fan and whatever thermal paste was still left on the heat sink (it's usually better to have too little than too much, so I wasn't worried about it). Sitting in bios with the case closed, it's running about 33 centigrade. I waited a while to make sure it was stable and then booted up. I'm posting while running it now. The interesting thing is that Suse 11.0 recognizes it in"My Computer" as a Phenom II running at 3,000mhz 4 cores. I did do a yast online update just before starting to work on it, but it didn't look like it downloaded anything special - "My Computer" must pull the info as a text string off the chip, I don't see how else 11.0 would have had that info available (current version of SUSE desktop is 11.1 and has been for about a month IIRC). I'll probably blow this box away and put windows on it now, although SuSE desktop is surprisingly easy to use. It's just that I think I can better exercise things with stuff that I work with more. Bottom line, just booting up and running a web browser and some utilities, it doesn't seem to use much power at all - it certainly isn't putting out much heat. CPU info (in SuSE Linux) is now showing the speed as 800mhz - I don't have sensors loaded, so I can't check the current temp. Edit - it popped back to 3,000 mhz when I prviewed, then back to 800. Cool and quiet is certainly working OK....