[geeks] CPU fans

[nate at portents.com]

> I (personally) don't understand $75 heatsink/fans, but I also don't
> overclock...

$75 heatsink/fans are overkill, but a good $30 one will take a 2.4Ghz
Q6600 (G0 rev) and allow you to run it at 3.6Ghz with just a tiny bump in
voltage.

Most $75 heatsink/fans are overkill, but people buy them anyway, so they
continue to make them.

BTW, if you haven't been following, the new Intel architectures (Core i5,
i7, etc.) have a sort of auto-overclock built into them.  Intel improved
the thermal monitoring, so the CPU tracks it's overall thermal
dissipation, and as long as it's under the upper bound set for the CPU, it
will increase the clocks to individual cores when the workload isn't using
all of them (so single-threaded, dual-threaded, and triple-threaded tasks
get a speed bump on a quad-core system).  It's interesting, and not a bad
idea.

- Nate