How Good Are AMD's Bundled Coolers For The Athlon XP ?

AMD 2700+ Bundled Cooler

The Athlon XP 2700+ ships with a composite cooler: a cooler profile made of aluminum and a base plate made from copper.

Four screws attach the plate to the profile, with a thin layer of thermal grease in between to reduce the thermal resistance. The base plate is nickel-plated, probably to prevent the copper from oxidizing. However, there's a downside to using nickel for the contact surface: nickel is a much worse heat conductor than copper (90.7 W/mK as opposed to 402 W/mK for copper). That said, this design does a more than adequate job of keeping die temperatures down: they peaked at 55° C under a full load, while the thermal resistance ran at 0.50° C/W. On the noise front, the cooler for the 2700+ generates a mere 46.6 dB(A), much less than the 2000+.