Question for the P4 owners

[Cougar]

As the title says, this question is directed at all the Pentium 4 owners out there (or even anyone who knows something about the processor). I've been reading a whole bunch of pentium 4 reviews and looking at pictures left and right and there's one thing I can't figure out. Why exactly is the heatsink so HUGE whenever the cpu is so tiny? I'm not trying to knock it (I am in fact planning to upgrade to a P4 sometime in the near future), but it just seems so wierd that such a tiny processor has such a huge heatsink.

 

[AndyHui]

The retail heatsink for the Pentium 4 is an excellent heat dissipator, and far better than what most people give credit for.

The usual laws apply: you can dissipate more heat with a larger heat sink surface area. Although the Socket 478 processor looks small, its contact area with the bottom of the heatsink is quite large due to the heatspreader. Only the part in contact with the heatsink is important....everything else is pretty much irrelevant.

Looking at it from that point of view, all of the non-IHS FC-PGA processors and all AMD Socket A processors have a much smaller surface area of contact.

 

[Cougar]

AndyHui....

I guess it does make sense that the larger the contact surface the larger heatsink should be, but the P4 heatsink looks gigantic comapred to the tiny cpu. It almost seems like overkill. Doesn't all that weight hurt the motherboard? I mean, if it's standing vertically and you have a beast of a heatsink tethered to the top of it wieghing it down, it almost seems like it would start to bend the motherboard (even though it is screwed into the case).

 

[HeinekinMan]

I agree with Andy in that the stock HSF works very well and is underrated by a lot of people. My P4-1.9 runs at 32 C idle and will get up to 47 C under full load and runs very quiet.

As for the weight of it, I didn't notice it that much when I assembled everything. What did not like was the way it attaches to the mobo. There are two plastic levers that need to be moved in opposite directions that force the HSF to "clamp" down onto the CPU/heat speader material. It took me 15 minutes of messing with it before I decided to move the levers completely to finish up with the assembly (the plastic levers flex so much that I was afraid of snapping something off! I would start, then stop...start then stop!). With this much clamping force, I don't think the weight of the HSF is much of an issue. And for the mobo (Asus P4T-E) flexing, I had used all of the mobo risers and screws so I didn't notice any bending/flexing of the mobo due to the clamping of the HSF retainers...

 

[Amused]

It's not made out of lead. It's pretty lightweight aluminum.

And the P4 looks small because of improved packaging. If you look at the older P4s, PIIIs, and the AMD procs, you'll note that the processor itself is very small, and surrounded by a comparatively large PCB board. All the P4 478 does is get rid of this superfluous PCB. In actuallity, the P4 has a larger contact area with it's heatsink than other processors.

 

[Texmaster]

<< As the title says, this question is directed at all the Pentium 4 owners out there (or even anyone who knows something about the processor). I've been reading a whole bunch of pentium 4 reviews and looking at pictures left and right and there's one thing I can't figure out. Why exactly is the heatsink so HUGE whenever the cpu is so tiny? I'm not trying to knock it (I am in fact planning to upgrade to a P4 sometime in the near future), but it just seems so wierd that such a tiny processor has such a huge heatsink. >>



MY guess would be better heat dissapation and more surface area means you can put a heavier fan and heasink on it and distribute the weight more evenly.