HSF Comparison Question

[kramerdk]

Many of the websites that review HSFs typically do so on Intel I5's or I7's. That's fine, but how do the I7's compare to say the AMD Phenom ii X4 or X6 in terms of heat output? Does TDP equate to heat across both chipsets? Can I look at a review for an I7 that has a TDP of say 130w (bad example) and compare it to the X4 TDP 125W?

Thanks,

 

[IntelEnthusiast]

TDP is Thermal Design Power and it isnt the ammount of power that the processor needs but the cooling that the processor is going to need. So yes the TDP on a 130w processor would compare well with the TDP on another processor. Just so you know our TDP is generally a good deal more then what is really need.


Christian Wood
Intel Enthusiast Team

 

[hunter315]

TDP is the amount of heat the processor will output worse case, some places like frostytech test using a 125W source with a heatspreader similar in shape and size to an AMD chip, and a test with a heatsource thats a similar shape and size to an intel LGA 775 processor at 85W and 150W.

While not exactly comparable because the AMD chips tend to have slightly larger surface area heatspreaders which may increase or decrease the performance vs an intel chip depending on the heatsink design, in general a heatsink testing a heavily OC'd Intel CPU will give similar results for an AMD chip sucking down a similar amount of power and vice versa.

 

[kramerdk]

Thanks for both answers. Very helpful!

 

[kramerdk]

Best answer selected by kramerdk.