[geeks] Ahh, the smell of Athlon's burning up

[Tim H.]

I buy Asus boards, my wife's PC is a K7m, Athlon 800(slot) mine is an A7V, Duron 700, and neither mobo has caused a bit of trouble.  mine is currently offline because the fan on the GForce card quit, and the card went away.  My wifes is running Win98, probably the longest lived win98 the family has had.  The secret to cooling PCs is not how many fans, but how the case is arranged.  I round all my flat cables, close off all unnecessary holes with duct tape, and arrange the fans so air enters the front, exits the rear, straight through the case.  if you leave holes open without fans in them you get random airflow, and they tend to suck air in the back and blow it right back out the powersupply, which cools nothing in the case.  A lot of PCs will drop several degrees just plugging up the empty holes inthe back.  I have also seen situations where the fins on the CPU were perpendicular to the airflow, and the bigger case fans would effectively starve the cpu fan, and the case wou!
ld run cool, but the cpu hot.  In those cases if I can't turn the heatsink I try to do some ducting in the box so the airflow helps the CPU fan, not starves it.  As a general rule I don't like orb type circular heatsinks, they just blow/suck air in a circle, which interferes with good straight through cooling.  The cheesy little 5.25 face plate fans in the empty drive bays can be a big step toward good straight through cooling. 

I have alway enjoyed the contrast between a generic PC case and brand name warkstation hardware.  We grumble about our sun pizza/shoeboxen, but they really do a lot better than attempting to stick random hardware in a box that size.  Apple is really good at case ducting, they have always run stuff fanless with no CPU fans etc. and I never hear about heat failures, even a lot of the PPC all-in-one cases had no fans other than PS, and there is a monitor in that box.

Tim

On Wed, 22 May 2002 10:58:12 -0600 (MDT)
Dave Kimmel <crisco_kid at shaw.ca> wrote:

> On Wed, 22 May 2002, Rick Hamell wrote:
> 
> > 	Exactly... everyone who is knocking AMD chips, never seems to
> > realize that 90% of the time it's the motherboard. I've never had problems
> > with Asus or Soltek. But Gigabyte, tyan, Shuttle, etc... nothing but
> > problems.
> 
> Ironically, my flaky Athlon system is using an Asus K7V.  Other than this
> one system, I've had really good luck with Asus boards and AMD CPUs.
> 
> -- Dave Kimmel
>    crisco_kid at shaw.ca
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