Here's a Thermaltake Golden
Orb cooler for SECC processors. It's a flashy number, but it works well
and only costs $RM70.00.
The basic design of the various
kinds of Golden Orb came from the much more impressively engineered Turbocooler,
made by Hewlett-Packard some years ago. The one behind the Orb in this picture
is inserted in its original workstation CPU cooling housing; various people
bought these old Orbs, popped them out of the housing and re-drilled them
to suit modern CPUs.
The Golden Orb is the cheap
and cheerful version of the Turbocooler. It's reasonably efficient (though
not nearly as good a heat-remover as the original), it looks nifty, and
it's available for various kinds of processor, without retrofitting.
Most coolers for SECC CPUs click
onto the thermal plate with no fuss, using a simple no-tools design that
holds pretty firmly and yet can generally be removed quite easily. Well,
provided the clips don't warp and lock in place, as sometimes happens. Then
you may find yourself requiring the services of a Russian trawlerman with
a 16 pound sledgehammer. But only to take the cooler off; putting even warped-clip
SECC coolers on is still generally very simple.
More recent slot-type PC CPUs,
like Intel's newer P-IIIs, use the "SECC2" cartridge, which is pretty much
just a SECC cartridge with the thermal plate removed. When there's no cooler
on a SECC2 CPU, you can look at the CPU circuit board with the processor
chip in the middle of it. But you generally don't get to see this, because
most SECC2 CPUs have a cooler installed from the factory.
If yours doesn't, or if you
want to upgrade a mediocre stock cooler, you can use something like this.
Another Golden Orb, this time for SECC2, without the extra fins and somewhat
cheaper, at $RM65.50.
Coolers attach to SECC2 CPUs
by means of pins through holes in the circuit board, retained by a clip
on the other side. Joe Average is not meant to fool with these coolers.
You can see the difference here;
the SECC Orb's on the left, the SECC2 one's on the right. The white square
on the SECC2 cooler base is factory-applied thermal transfer compound, of
which more in a moment.
SECC2 CPUs may commonly come
with coolers pre-installed, but anybody who installs a socketed CPU is definitely
going to have to install a cooler as well. Retail boxed socket CPUs come
with a cooler that's made for them, and Intel's recent efforts in this field
have been quite good.
AMD, however, doesn't yet seem
to have made any retail boxed Socket A CPUs, and certainly doesn't have
one approved cooler for them. You buy Socket A CPUs out of a tray, and pick
your own cooler at the same time. Given that they're much cheaper than Intel
chips - a 600MHz Duron is faster than a 600MHz Celeron, but something like
two-thirds of the price - most people find this an acceptable deal.
The basic idea for socket CPU
coolers is simple enough - little moulded hooks stick out of the side of
the tough fibre reinforced plastic CPU socket, and some gizmo or other clips
onto them to hold the cooler down.
The hold-down gadgets are referred
to as "retention mechanisms" by people whose job it is to design and sell
them, while still maintaining a skerrick of self-esteem. They're often quite
stiff, because the harder they clamp on, the better the thermal contact.
And thermal contact is the whole idea. If getting heat from the CPU to the
cooler wasn't important, we could all save a lot of time by leaving the
cooler in the box.
The quality of the thermal contact
between cooler and CPU - or between cooler and heat plate, in SECC processors
- is linked to the clamping force. But it also depends on the flatness of
the mating surfaces of the CPU and the heatsink, and on what's in the gap.
The flatter the mating surfaces are, the smaller will be the tiny gaps between
them, and the more heat will be transferred.
The tiny gaps will always be
there, though, and they should be filled with some sort of "thermal transfer
compound" - commonly known as heatsink grease. Hence the white square on
the SECC2 Orb. The SECC Orb needs more grease, to cover the whole mating
area between the Orb's plate and the processor cartridge thermal plate;
it comes with a little sachet of the stuff.
Heatsink grease conducts heat
much better than air, but much worse than direct contact. So there should,
ideally, be just enough grease in there to fill the gaps, and not enough
to make a goopy blanket in the joint.
Many cheaper CPU coolers have
just a rubbery stick-on pad on the bottom, not grease. Thermal pads work
better than a dry join, but not as well as a greased one; you can "hop up"
these coolers by scraping the pad off and replacing it with an appropriate
smear of heatsink grease. Better coolers these days come with pre-applied
semi-solid thermal goop pre-applied, which gives you the best of both worlds.
Thermal glop isn't the problem,
though. The problem is mechanical.
