Underclock a Celery 366? No fan?

[mikepeck]

Is it possible to run a Socket 370 Celeron 366 with no fan. Would I have to underclock it at all? I'm trying to fit components into a very small custom case for a MP3 player... Any advice would be appriciated..

 

[luckydragon]

i would not do that unless you have a huge heatsink and good amount of air ciculating throughout the case

 

[mikepeck]

Don't these processors run pretty cool?

 

[pandaflux]

you wouldnt really be able to underclock it because it already has a 66mhz bus, unless of course you found some board that still supported 60mhz.

since you have a socket 370 board you might want to try to run a Via Cyrix III 700MHZ. its about the same price as a 366 celeron and its made on a .18 process so it will run cool. they are multiplier unlocked so you could take it down to say 200-366mhz and have plenty of power to run a mp3 player, by lowering the processing speed so much you could no doubt in turn lower the default voltage for the chip.
-or you could get a .18 1.5v celeron II 533 those already run cool probably cooler than a .25 2.0v 366 would

matthew

 

[luckydragon]

not really, i would not recommend it

 

[Swanny]

<< its about the same price as a 366 celeron and its made on a .18 process so it will run cool. >>


Cyrix III is on a .15 micron process

 

[BurntKooshie]

mikepeck - here's one option: You could run it without a fan, underclock it if possible (you'll only need it for MP3's, in which case you don't need all that power anyway), so that'll cut back the heat, assuming you havea motherboard which supports < 66mhz FSB. Then, run either Linux, or win2k, or win9x but using something like RAIN. Basically, you'll just want to run mp3's, nothing more, so that uses up, perhaps, 10% of the CPU time (at 366mhz), and the other 90% of the time you have it doing nothing by using the HLT command (which is turned on by default in win2k, and most distro's of linux, afaik), and if you only use win9x, then you can get something like RAIN, which does the same thing.

At max, the 366 dissipates ~20watts. Under &quot;normal&quot; application (ask Intel what &quot;normal&quot; is), it's at ~14 watts. If your CPU is using the HLT command, and runs only mp3's, you should be fine with merely a heatsink.

 

[mikepeck]

Excellent.. Thanks for the advice... I was planning on running Linux on it.. And I'll just have to find a good heatsink. I'll probably have to have one fan in the box for the power supply.. So maybe I can direct it such it tackles both problems.

 

[pandaflux]

Here are a couple quotes from anand's review of the VIA Cyrix III.

The Samuel2 based Cyrix III runs off a low 1.5 volts and requires only 4.5 watts of power for a 600 MHz clock speed and 5.1 watts for the 700 MHz clock speed. This is far lower than Intel solutions. The mobile Celeron 600 MHz (which operates at 1.6 volts), for example, requires 5.8 watts to run.

Once again, this allows the Samuel2 core to penetrate ultra portable devices, where space and power requirements do not allow for a cooling fan.

Since you dont need a powerful processor to decode mp3s this looks like a very dueable option considering the voltage and wattage produced will be virtually nill if you underclock the chip to half its spec'd speed.

matthew

 

[mikepeck]

Wow.. I didn't know the power usage was that low. And I just bought a Celeron... Maybe I'll use that for testing and then find a Cryix III for the final production. Thanks for all the advice!