Building The Ultimate Home Theater PC

Better Heat Dissipation In The Stress Test

Better cooling? We can't wait to find out

Even just the positioning of the CPU fan promised better dissipation of heat. For starters, the CPU fan is now underneath the vent openings, and second of all, the fins of the CPU cooler run towards the I/O panel.

Even so, AMD produces less heat than its Intel counterpart.

Rebuilding paid off. The heat output of the AMD Athlon64 system is significantly lower. The sensors show considerably less heat. And that also had a positive side effect: The CPU does not need to throttle and maintains its 2 GHz speed over the long run. Even in terms of the noise level, the Athlon64 was on its best behavior. The Cool´N´Quiet technology kept the CPU fan very quiet. At a distance of 6.56 ft. (two meters), you could only hear the fan under the maximum load of the stress test. But who actually has their HTPC running at 100% capacity in the living room? When playing back DVDs or recording, neither the DVD drive nor the hard drive could be heard. When used in this manner, the load on the CPU was less than 10%. Cool´N´Quiet even caused the fans to stop several times. Only when the heat level began to rise again did the CPU need to be cooled a bit by starting the CPU fan.

The AMD Athlon64 CPU remains constant at just under 2 GHz.

No throttling: When well-ventilated, the AMD CPU does not slow down at all.