Stock or Zalman cooler for Opteron 185?

S

SkyMonkey

Gawd
Joined
Jan 30, 2001
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Tomorrow's mail will bring the final upgrade for my A8N-SLI Deluxe in the form of some new memory and an Opteron 185.

I currently have a 3200+ in there with a Zalman CNPS7000B-ALCU cooler. The Opteron was bought retail and comes with a cooler. Am I better off running the stock cooler, or will the Zalman do the job? Quiet is good, which is why the Zalman was purchaced in the first place.

-SM
 
the zalman FTW:

AMD stock coolers are pretty good but full spin @63db ir crazy loud:eek:

definitely zalman
 
This chip is running REALLY hot with the Zalman. I've tried a lot of different things, increased overall airflow, ran with the case off, throughly cleaned the heat spreader and heat sink and reapplied, turned the voltage down to 1.325 etc. Temps are about 40/45 in coretemp when idling, and the prime95 short fft toture test has gotten the temps up to 66/69. Coretemp jumps around a lot, so +/- 2 degrees on each of those.

I am starting to think the chip is defective. I bought it in box from newegg, and it looked as though it had been used. Center of the heat spreader is marked with a pattern that looked like it might have been mated to a thermal pad before.

It's been stable, though I've only run p95 for 1/2 hour at a time. I did play WoW for a few hours without a problem.

It's got a 3 year warranty, but I'm thinking about RMAing it now. I am going to try to burn it in first though, as I really don't trust the temps I'm seeing compared to ambient and in the case. Once I get my drives set up, I'm going to let it p95 for a day and memtest as well...if everything is OK, I might just keep it.

Advice?


Bleh....
 
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