P4 heat sink for passive cooling?

[cmetz]

I'm about to drop a P4 2.4C into a data center environment where it will be expected to run for a few years. My personal experience is that I can't exactly depend on heat sink fans to keep on turning for a few years, so I'm looking to affix a monster heat sink to the chip in hopes that, should the CPU fan fail, passive cooling and case fans will do enough to keep it going.

Am I crazy? I don't *think* I am - my desktop Athlon 1800+ ran for six months with a non-working heat sink fan before I even noticed. My Alpha PAL8045 was clearly a good investment

Reviews of heat sinks that are out there are typically with stock or enhanced CPU fans, and don't necessarily get into how well they would do sans fan. Granted, these heat sinks are designed to work with a fan and so taking the fan out of the picture may be a bit too much, but you can see that the best heat sink with a fan might not be the best without...

 

[yuppiejr]

The P4's have a thermal protection feature that will throttle the CPU down if it reaches unsafe temperatures and avoid self destruction. Technically you can run a P4 without any heatsink installed and it will simply slow itself down until a non dangerous temperature is maintained.

I'd think one of the Zalman "flower" style copper heatsinks would be the best bet for a passive setup, or one using large 80-90-120 mm fans.

 

[Lyfer]

Get one of those new SLK900's with heat pipe, and slap on a 90MM panaflow thats dead silent.