Is my heatsink any good ?

hmmm. seems normal to me. i spent around 23$ for the Volcano 6Cu which has only a round copper base and aluminium fins. with the fan running at 3200rpm i get 33C at idle and 38C at full load with default clock speed. When i overclock my CPU to ~1900MHz, i hit 43C at idle and 53C at full load.

Now back to ur question. For a pure copper Heatsink, i think the temp u r getting is a little high, unless u have overclocked the CPU. btw, do u have the stock HSF that comes with the CPU? if so what temp were u getting earlier? compare the two and see for urself

33 C and you're worrying about it? Find something else to worry about.

War Eagle

You won't be the first person to have problems getting things right on an AMD system. Before you spend more money on heatsinks, there are several things you can do...

The first thing to check is that you have the heatsink installed the right way around... there is a step in the bottom of the heatsink, this is to clear the cambox on the socket (where the locking arm joins). Get it the wrong way around and it won't contact the chip correctly.

You also wouldn't be the first person to have a bad experience with the pre-applied thermal gunk on these heatsinks. Did you remember to remove the plastic protector before installing it?

And finally... if you don't get the darned things centered on the socket lugs, the spring clip that is supposed to hold the heatsink in place can actually push it out of place. The tolerances on this are fairly tight, so it's something that can easily become a problem.


I'd suggest you get some heatsink compound (Radio Shack has a good one, most computer stores stock some brand or another, Arctic Silver is very wel liked), pulling off your heatsink, get rid of all the prevous thermal goop, clean it all down hospital clean with alcohol. Get all the dust out of the fins. Apply thermal grease and re-assemble it.

If this doesn't fix the problem, you most likely will have to look into getting a <b>non-conductive</b> shim for it. This will mechanically immobilize the heatsink on top of the cpu and should provide better alignment between the heat island and heatsink base.

If all this fails... look into getting a good quality hybrid heatsink with a thermal resistence below .6 (the smaller the number the better). Hybrids have copper bottoms and almuminum fins for maximum effect and when installed with a shim can provide excellent cooling.

The application instructions for thermal grease are here:
<A HREF="http://www.arcticsilver.com/arctic_silver_instructions.htm" target="_new">http://www.arcticsilver.com/arctic_silver_instructions.htm</A>
(Brand doesn't matter, use the same method for all)

An example of a good hybrid heatsink is here:
<A HREF="http://www.spirecooler.com/asp/fcc.asp?ProdID=95" target="_new">http://www.spirecooler.com/asp/fcc.asp?ProdID=95</A>

And here's the shim I was talking about:
<A HREF="http://www.casecooler.com/unnonmicshim.html" target="_new">http://www.casecooler.com/unnonmicshim.html</A>

Hope this helps...



--->It ain't better if it don't work<---