Well, that last comment was something I was hoping for. Over the years, I have had many Thermaltake products. Volcano 9 (2 of them), Volcano 12  and a SubZero4G (Thermo-electric cooling). Now for the most part, they worked quite well, the SubZero wasn’t as quiet as they claimed unless you didn’t mind the temperatures being far higher than normal, but fairly good non-the-less.

    All the heat sinks I used were for AMD Athlon and XP CPU’s, both families were ‘warm’ CPU’s to put it mildly, they needed the extra cooling. However, in more recent times, I upgraded to the AMD 64 series, a 3500, and due to unfortunate events at QuakeCon, a 3000 as well.

    The first thing I noticed with the change to socket 939, was the ease of installations for the stock heat sink. Just hook one metal clip, push down a bit on the other one (no screwdriver required!) and flip the plastic clip down. POOF! All installed, no more worrying “I hope I didn’t crush the core!”…. I can’t believe they let socket A live for as long as they did.

    The second thing I noticed about the processor, was the temperature it ran at. Stock cooling, with the standard heat sink compound left unchanged, my AMD 64 3500 idled at around 30-31C, depending on the temperature of the room.

    Now, even though I live in Canada, this was a far cry from the average idle temperatures of 50C for my old AMD 2500 Barton with the stock heat sink. Even under load, my 3500 never went above 35C, the heat sink wasn’t even warm to the touch.

    Having temperatures that low, I didn’t think about getting a 3^rd party cooler, I just didn’t feel it would provide an advantage to cool the processor anymore. After being handed the Big Typhoon though, I thought “Well, since it’s free, better cooling certainly isn’t going to hurt anything!”