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Aftermarket cooler...

H

homercles337

Diamond Member
I recently upgraded to an X2 4400 and need an after-market cooler to OC. However, there doesnt seem to be any resources for cooler/mobo compatibility. I picked up a cooler yesterday only to discover that the heat pipes collided with some capacitors near the socket and the ram modules are pretty close too. Any suggestions? TIA.

-homer
 
From personal experience the Ninja fits, but barely. Had to modify GPU to get things to cohabitate...This was with an ATI card.

Thermalright Si-120 wouldn't fit either.

Ninja on a Neo2 w/ ATI card

The cooler I ended up using and liked the most was the XP-90. Not as good as some of the newer offerings, but no slouch.

XP-90
 
Thanks guys. Interesting. I picked up the Scythe Ninja yesterday (the one in both of your first links). This is the cooler that collided with the capacitors. Any heatpipes coming out from the sink toward the front or back of the mobo will not likely work.

The clips are on the top and bottom too. This means that the zalman CNPS would likely be pointing up (toward my PSU) or down (toward my graphics card). Unless the clips pass through the heat pipes. I have looked at pics online and my capacitors are a bit closer than other MSI Neo4s. I think the Freezer would work. I like the Tuniq Tower, but cant tell how it would attach. Also, i dont think the Thermaltake would work either. I have read about performance on all these coolers, but didnt have a fresh look at my mobo until i tried to attach the Ninja. Thanks for the info...
 
Update: I got this (ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 64 Pro) cooler and installed yesterday. I havent done any serious testing, just monitoring temps during normal usage. The thing is POS! :| I have temps that are cooler by a mere 2-6 C from the stock sink from my 3500.

To start, I cleaned off the stock thermal paste to discover that the sink was FULL of deep grooves and it was rather feeble and small. I lapped with 400 for an hour, then to 600 for about 30 minutes. This was sufficient to rid the sink of the grooves and made it nice and flat. I used AC5 to reinstall, but what more am i supposed to do to get cooler temps? I want to OC this chip (4400 X2), but my cooler choices are quite limited with my mobo. I am not pleased.
 
2-6 degrees cooler than stock with less noise than stock isn't what I would call crap. It isn't an expensive cooler, what did you expect? 😉

Any pics of your mobo without a heatsink installed so we can get an idea of how much space we have to work with? I'm guessing you have the original Neo? eljaye925 said that he got the ninja to fit, but he has the neo2 so I'm guessing it might be laid out differently.
 
Originally posted by: homercles337
Update: I got this (ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 64 Pro) cooler and installed yesterday. I havent done any serious testing, just monitoring temps during normal usage. The thing is POS! :| I have temps that are cooler by a mere 2-6 C from the stock sink from my 3500.

To start, I cleaned off the stock thermal paste to discover that the sink was FULL of deep grooves and it was rather feeble and small. I lapped with 400 for an hour, then to 600 for about 30 minutes. This was sufficient to rid the sink of the grooves and made it nice and flat. I used AC5 to reinstall, but what more am i supposed to do to get cooler temps? I want to OC this chip (4400 X2), but my cooler choices are quite limited with my mobo. I am not pleased.
Click to expand...

From what I have heard, the rough bottom surface of the Freezer 64 is there for a purpose. When you use the included AC MX-1 Thermal Paste (generally agreed to be better than AS5) on the rough surface of the F64 Pro, you should get better results than using AS5 or other pastes.

I don't know about your setup, but I do know that my CPU runs about 5-10C cooler than a 2.5GHz 3200+ that is in a friend's system.
 
Originally posted by: SparkyJJO
2-6 degrees cooler than stock with less noise than stock isn't what I would call crap. It isn't an expensive cooler, what did you expect? 😉

Any pics of your mobo without a heatsink installed so we can get an idea of how much space we have to work with? I'm guessing you have the original Neo? eljaye925 said that he got the ninja to fit, but he has the neo2 so I'm guessing it might be laid out differently.
Click to expand...

Mobo Here is the pic i took to go back to microcenter and find a cooler that fit (sh!tty cell pic, sorry). I dont know what i expected really, but i expected to see more than 2 degrees. Not that 48C is hot. This is my first aftermarket CPU cooler though.

Originally posted by: 996GT2
From what I have heard, the rough bottom surface of the Freezer 64 is there for a purpose. When you use the included AC MX-1 Thermal Paste (generally agreed to be better than AS5) on the rough surface of the F64 Pro, you should get better results than using AS5 or other pastes.

I don't know about your setup, but I do know that my CPU runs about 5-10C cooler than a 2.5GHz 3200+ that is in a friend's system.
Click to expand...

Well, i did read a few things about this cooler, but i didnt hear about this "special" heatsink. Also, i couldnt use the stock thermal compound anyway since i accidentally rubbed it. To be honest, i would never use stock thermal compound. Do you have a link to the "special" advantages of all th grooves? Everything i have ever read says there is never an advantage to air or extra thermal compound between the sink and chip. I would like to know though. Not that i can fix this one. 😉 If anything, it could save me a few hours lapping in the future.

 
After a bit of searching, I found this info on thermal pastes...the stuff that comes with The Freezer 64 is by no means just "any stock paste"

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...tid=28&threadid=2037560&enterthread=y)

Bad Thermal Compound
Tital Nano Blue 59
Panasonic 58.5
KPT-8 (reference) 56.6

Decent Thermal Compound
Data Cooler 57
Titan TTG S-104 , S-103 56.7
Pasta Siliconowa 56.6
Zalman CSL 850 56.5
Noctua 56.5
Stars Silver 56.5
Stars 700/Aero 700 56
GeIL GL-TCP1b 55.6
Thermopox 55.6
(BeO) 55.51
Sil more 55.5
Shin-Etsu(white) 55.5
W.P. 55.5
STARS (white, soft pack) 55.5
AKT-842 55
Fanner 420 55
Koolance 55

Good Thermal Compound
Arctic Alumina 55.5
Arctic Silver-3 54.6
AOS 54.5
DC-340 54.5
Asetek 54.5
Arctic Silver-5 53.5
Arctic Ceramique 53.5

Great Thermal Compound
Apus TMG 301 52.5
Gigabyte 52.5
Titan Nano Grease TTG-G30010 52.5
GFC-M1 D90T8-010 52.5
Shin-Etsu MicroSi G-751 52

Best Thermal Compound
Arctic Cooling MX-1 51.5
Shin-Etsu MicroSi MPU-3.7 50.5
Coollaboratory Liquid Pro 50

As you can see, AC MX-1 (essentially Shin-Etsu G-751) is one of the best thermal interface materials out there. It's only beat by the Shin-Etsu and Liquid Pro, but the latter is a serious hassle to apply (dissolves aluminum also).

I didn't take the time to find the bit about the rough base of the F64 Pro, but I do know that someone posted a warning from AC not to lap the base of the Freezer 64 a while back. However, to properly apply the MX-1 on a Freezer 64 you should remove most of it and just leave a bit in the center, which you should then spread with a plastic film to a thin evenness around the base of the HSF.
 
Thanks for the info. Im usually on top of my homework with this stuff, but it appears that i really screwed up on this one. A warning or an insert about the "textured heatsink" would be appropriate in this case. As for the compound, well thats news to me.

Anyway, i just read a review of this cooler and they are getting much better temps than i am. I can only assume it has to do to the fact that i lapped the sink.

Any suggestions on a cooler i can buy that would fit this mobo? Im going to get something else AND do my homework. 😉
 
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