Water Cooling Is Recommended For 4.0 GHz, Continued
Throttling back causes processor performance to fall off. At 4 GHz, power consumption also increases by a few watts, so that when compared to its original power consumption level of about 80 W, it must now deal with 195 W at maximum load.
| Pentium D 805 | Zalman Cooler | |
|---|---|---|
| Clock Rate | 100% Utilization | Idle Mode |
| 4.10 GHz | crash | 52 °C |
| 4.00 GHz | 80 °C | 49 °C |
| 3.80 GHz | 76 °C | 47 °C |
| 3.60 GHz | 74 °C | 46 °C |
| 3.32 GHz | 71 °C | 46 °C |
| 2.66 GHz | 64 °C | 44 °C |
It was clear that air cooling solutions were no longer sufficient to let the system function at 4 GHz in all situations, so we switched to a water-cooled solution for this CPU. It worked!
Water cooling let the system transfer heat away from the CPU and keep working at top speed.
At a 200 MHz FSB clock rate, we can use the complete memory bandwidth for DDR2-667. Likewise, DDR2-800 now appears as a usable selection in the BIOS.
With memory speeds of up to DDR2-800, we can exploit 4 GHz CPU performance to its fullest potential.
We ran through our benchmarks with both DDR2-667 and DDR2-800 memory configurations.
At a setting of 1.5625 V for core voltage, the CPU we purchased at a retail outlet ran trouble-free.
