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Which was Intel's first CPU to require a cooler?

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Matt1970 said:
The 486DX4-100 was a 25 Bus and a 4 Multiplier. There was also a DX4-120 but I think that was AMD only.
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I don't remember what 486 branded parts AMD had, but their Am5x86 was a 486 at 133MHz. Reasonably fast for the price back then. It needed both a heatsink and a fan.

 
Tsavo said:
I don't remember what 486 branded parts AMD had, but their Am5x86 was a 486 at 133MHz. Reasonably fast for the price back then. It needed both a heatsink and a fan.
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Think i have one of those in a box somewhere
 
I had a Dell with a pentium 3. It just had a heatsink on the cpu. But it also had a case fan with a shroud that covered the heatsink. So would you say that cpu had passive or active cooling?
 
A bit off topic but it's kind of crazy to think back to my 486 and firing up warcraft2 and command and conquer. (c&c barely worked, had to run a special boot or whatever to free up the extra morsels of ram...I dont even remember the terms it's been so long!)

Now fast forward to today and CPU's are what... 50-100xmore powerful? and the RTS games have not changed much. Really the AI is not much different from back then nor are the games much different. Graphically they are better of course, but in complexity I'm surprised they could do so much back then.
 
lucklessgorath said:
I had a Dell with a pentium 3. It just had a heatsink on the cpu. But it also had a case fan with a shroud that covered the heatsink. So would you say that cpu had passive or active cooling?
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Active cooling.

As soon as the air-flow is non-zero for any reason other than so-called "buoyancy forces" the heatsink is then considered to be "actively cooled".

The radiator on your car is actively cooled, whether the fan is on or off, when you are driving your car as the car moving through the air is enough to force the air-cooling of the radiator itself. But as soon as you stop the car, provided the radiator fan is also turned off and there is no breeze at the time, the radiator then becomes "passively cooled".

Passively cooled can involve as large of a heatsink as you like, connect it to a 10 m^3 block of steel for all that it matters, but the air-flow can only be that created naturally owing to "hot air rises, cool air sinks" type density-gradient induced convection.

To get technical about it, the air convection must be "natural" and not forced in order for the cooling to be technically passive and not active.

Convection can be "forced" by movement of a fluid by means other than buoyancy forces (for example, a water pump in an automobile engine). In some cases, natural buoyancy forces alone are entirely responsible for fluid motion when the fluid is heated, and this process is called "natural convection."

An example is the draft in a chimney or around any fire. In natural convection, an increase in temperature produces a reduction in density, which causes fluid motion due to pressures and forces when fluids of different densities are affected by gravity (or any g-force). For example, when water is heated on a stove, hot water from the bottom of the pan rises, displacing the colder denser liquid which falls. After heating has stopped, mixing and conduction from this natural convection eventually result in a nearly homogeneous density, and even temperature.
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Passive air-cooling involves only natural convection, which intrinsicly allows for air-movement but only the kind of air-movement that is created by virtue of temperature induced density mixing and so on.

Place a fan as far away from the heatsink as you like, but if the air moving past a heatsink is moving for any reason other than natural convection then the heatsink is being actively cooled.
 
Rvenger said:
Via C3 750mhz.. naked
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The C3 chips say they need a heatsink on the heatspreader. However, I've read numerous reports about these chips being able to run without a heatsink - one report saying 800mhz and lower without a heatsink works fine.

There's some low TDPs listed for the 150nm and 130nm C3 chips. I know they were no Pentium 3 in regards to performance, but I wonder if there's any truth to the claims of heatsinkless operation? That 2.5W 667mhz and 3W 766mhz look particularly promising even being the earlier 150nm/higher volts variant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_VIA_C3_microprocessors#C3
 
I've got an odd one as it is a Dell -- Pentium 4 2 GHz Northwood that utilizes a large heatsink and then has a plastic 'shroud' that funnels that to a fan thats about 4-5+ inches away at the back of the computer (like a typical case fan) -- no issues with overheating in the near 11 years of use. Tho I never did try and get a PresHOT(Prescott) as that would probably fry.

edit--looks like someone else noted this too, tho with a P3, mine's a P4!
 
Pheesh said:
A bit off topic but it's kind of crazy to think back to my 486 and firing up warcraft2 and command and conquer. (c&c barely worked, had to run a special boot or whatever to free up the extra morsels of ram...I dont even remember the terms it's been so long!)
Click to expand...

I played Doom on my PC after work hours, it was a DX4-100 and I think the fastest computer in the whole company. Had to do it after work since I didn't even own one at home, most people didn't. I remember a friend not too much later spending around $2500, huge bucks back then, for a P200 "Pro" to do games and Photoshop, thinking that at that expense it would last him basically forever. Sometime after that, but not too much later, the Voodoo cards came out.

Yeah this thread is a trip down memory lane.

On a slightly related note, I remember Cyrix chips around this same time frame too.
 
fixbsod said:
I've got an odd one as it is a Dell -- Pentium 4 2 GHz Northwood that utilizes a large heatsink and then has a plastic 'shroud' that funnels that to a fan thats about 4-5+ inches away at the back of the computer (like a typical case fan) -- no issues with overheating in the near 11 years of use. Tho I never did try and get a PresHOT(Prescott) as that would probably fry.

edit--looks like someone else noted this too, tho with a P3, mine's a P4!
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I had dell 400SC with Prescott 3 Gig running with 800Mhz FSB and it was same setup except it had thermal control Case Fan.......
I never had a problem and hard gaming it become little noisy though......
HeatSink was Copper Fins!
 
Hardware was more interesting back in the 486/586/P2 days. The golden age of being a PC nerd imo. CPU's made steady progress, 3d gaming was in its infancy and exciting.

Now it's all boring IPC increases and smartphones. I think Core2 was the last genuinely interesting generation IMO. GPU's are the same. It's been years since a really interesting generation came around.
 
I can remember look look on my cousins face when we had the heat sink off my P133 and turned it on, and he stuck his finger on it. I swear I could hear it sizzle when he did. Burnt him pretty good.
 
james1701 said:
I can remember look look on my cousins face when we had the heat sink off my P133 and turned it on, and he stuck his finger on it. I swear I could hear it sizzle when he did. Burnt him pretty good.
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Yeah, it was "your cousin", yeah sure, that's how it went down, yeah :hmm:
 
Idontcare said:
Yeah, it was "your cousin", yeah sure, that's how it went down, yeah :hmm:
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lol, yeah, we were big on playing Comanche 3.0 in a Lan at the time. He had the P133, and we were swapping his chip for mine. I had a P100, I think at the time. He made a good lab monkey lol.
 
I was curious about this question myself and this thread came up as the top result so I thought I'd add my two pence.

My first CPU was a 386SX-25 which was obviously bare (although they did become warm to the touch when powered up). My second CPU was an AMD 486DX4-100 and that one explicitly says on the actual chip "requires heatsink". So I don't know about Intel chips but I'm guessing that, given similar speeds and transistor counts you could say the same for the equivalent Intel model. Looking here it seems the first model to require a heatsink was the DX2-80. Oddly though the DX4-90 appears to be the first model requiring a fan too. Why that needs one and the 100Mhz model doesn't I don't know. Maybe heatsinks were bigger that year...
 
Tsavo said:
I don't remember what 486 branded parts AMD had, but their Am5x86 was a 486 at 133MHz. Reasonably fast for the price back then. It needed both a heatsink and a fan.
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I had one of those. "Everyone" said that those would run effortlessly at 40Mhz x 4. So I tried it. Board (Sis chipset with PCI slots, fairly modern for back then) promptly wiped my MBR. Spent a few hours re-constructing my partition table manually with Norton Disk Editor.
 
My 8086, 286, 386 SX were bare, my 486 DX2 had heatsinks and my Pentium 66Mhz had a heatsink and a fan.

Had to check. I still have all these in my closet. Just boards and chips though, no cases or PSUs.
 
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Don't remember off hand but probably Pentium 60 or 75 (I had a 75 and 90, the 90 was SUPER hot). My 5x86 80MHz had a passive heatsink too.

Pentium Pro absolutely needed them, I had a dual PPro that served me 12 years with less than 1% downtime with the same fans and heatsink the whole time.
 
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