Athlon 939Pin Heatsink +Fan advice needed

[kormer]

I read through some of the help threads above, but didn't see anything relating to the 939pin processors. Can anyone give me some advice on a good heatsink + Fan for a 939pin athlon 64 3500? Also, any advice on a decent case fan that is quiet and still cools well. I don't mind paying a little bit more either if the performance is worth it.

[G00s3]

Thermalright heatsinks are always an excellent choice and about the best sinks you can find. Their SLK and SP series are great performers. Combined with a good fan this is as good as air cooling gets. The Zalman coolers would be my second choice, performance is not as good but they make up for that with easy installation (Thermalright's a bit harder to install correctly) and silent operation (although you can mount a silent fan on a Thermalright of course).

As for case fans, there are several good brands: Panaflo, Papst, Enermax are names that come to mind. Zalman, SilenX, NoiseBlocker are other names though I'm not as sure about these. Hope this helps.

[kormer]

Do I need to make sure that the fan will fit on a 939 proc, or are they fairly generic in that respect?

[G00s3]

For compatibility you can check the Zalman website for their coolers. I believe Thermalright has the XP-120 for socket 939, which has the tiny disadvantage that it's massively oversized (not heavy though) so it doesn't fit all boards. The XP-90 performs almost as well and is somewhat smaller. These are the ones I'm sure will fit 939, don't know about the rest.

[Beenthere]

XP-90 is the way to go.

Fans are generic and you pick the one that has the highest CFM flow at a noise level that is comfortable to your ears. 30 DBA is pretty quiet. 50 DBa is uncomfortable for virtually anyone.

http://heatsinkfactory.com/cgi-bin/H...ight%20Coolers

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article194-page1.html


From the Thermalright website:

"XP-90 is designed to fit all AMD socket 754/939/940 motherboards (*Gigabyte K8 motherboards see below) and Intel Pentium 4 socket 478 motherboards. So far, we have not found any board that is not compatible with XP-90. If you've found any, we would appreciate if you could report them to here.

* Unlike other mobo makers, Gigabyte uses a customized plastic motherboard backplate for its K8 motherboards, which is not compatible with XP-90 K8 retention bracket. Users need to remove it and replace it with a standard metal backplate before installation of Thermalright XP series heatsink. For more information regarding AMD K8 backplate please see Athlon64 processor thermal design guide (Fig. 5 & 6).