The Pentium D: Intel's Dual Core Silver Bullet Previewed

By Patrick Schmid
published

Intel Reference Cooler With More Copper And Larger Surface

The copper core is quite obviously bigger than before.

All Intel boxed processors come bundled with a suitable cooler. Due to the increased maximum thermal design power of the fast Smithfield models, Intel made some changes to their reference cooler design; they increased both the surface area and the size of the copper core in order to improve heat dissipation.

The old cooler: the fins are split into two branches.

The new guy: there are more fins now and they are thinner.

Patrick Schmid
2 Comments Comment from the forums
  • DaveF1953
    How much can the Extreme Edition be had for now? $40? Sounds like a deal to me. Although, older, hotter, and slower in the long run. Best bet now. No?
    Reply
  • wild9
    I'd just go AMD or Core 2, the former having a much lower power draw and great overclocking potential than what you have here. My relative used to run Intel Extreme Editions like this, and the power draw was immense, he had to use water cooling. In the end he ditched it and got AMD. Not trying to say one is better than the other all the time (ie for media encoding the Intel was great), just some ideas to consider. Cheap dual-core AMD's based on AM2 are hard to beat at the moment.
    Reply