CPU Temperatures - Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro
I've long been a believer in keeping my systems as cool as possible. Not because I overclock, but just because it's better for everything and improves the stability of the system. I've discovered, over the years, that cheaping out on cases is a bad idea. But I've often stayed with the official CPU heat sink and fan. Because, frankly, in a good case they've been quite sufficient for my needs. But my main virtualization server, an Asus P5WD2 Premium with a D-930 CPU that has several SATAII hard disks and 6GB of RAM was running seriously hot. The CPU was spending a good deal of time over 60 C, and peaking at nearly 70 C. Not a good thing, and there were other signs of heat related instability. Time to get serious. So, after looking around a bit, I decided to get an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro. It was not the most expensive, certainly, but has a good reputation for quiet, and had positive reviews of its efficiency and cooling. So, for $25 or so, I ordered one up from NCIX, my preferred vendor these days.
Installation was a nuisance - that awful Intel mounting system is also used by the AC Freezer 7 Pro, and it's fiddly to get it properly locked in. And the Asus motherboard doesn't give me a whole lot of finger room in this Antec Sonata II case. But after diddling around a bit, I got it. A nice touch is that the AC Freezer 7 Pro comes with thermal goop already applied, making the whole process easier and less messy. And it has you remove the fan and shroud when mounting, which also helps. But I still hate those fiddly little snap in things.
The AC Freezer 7 Pro is an upright cooler with a backwards blowing fan. It is actually quite light in weight, much more so than some of the competitors, which is probably a good thing in terms of the stress placed on the motherboard. In any case, once it was fully installed and plugged in, I closed the case back up and started Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise x64 Edition. What a difference! My idle CPU temperature dropped to 25 degrees C - about 3 degrees over ambient, here. And so far, in 4 days of running it, I've never managed to get the temperature up over 34 degrees C. Now that's just amazing. AND, what's almost as important - it's QUIET. Much quieter than the stock one. Highly recommended, and they make an equivalent one for AMD processors.
Charlie.
UPDATE: During the installation of Centro into three 64-bit virtual machines on this box, with CPU usages running over 80%, and mostly over 95%, for well over an hour, I managed to get the temperature up all the way to 40 degrees! Now THAT's impressive. I'm loving this cooler. I strongly suspect I'd have simply crashed out of the installation without it.