Low End Cooling

I am trying to figure out what a good heatsink/fan would be for a Athlon II 630 to upgrade from the stock. CPU's in the mail right now so I don't know if the stock will be ok, but I read that it is noisy somewhat. I prefer silent systems.

I am not looking to spend a great deal of money and do not intend to do much if any overclocking since it is only a business system.

MSI 870A-G54 AM3 AMD 870 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130275

The board seems to be able to overclock fairly easy, so if there is a heatsink that is low priced and able to cool ok I may consider it. But it's not a goal. The big thing is low cost and quiet operation. It's just sort of confusing sometimes on newegg as to which are ok for AM3 mounts. It's not easily filtered since there are a lot of AM2+ or whatnots that when you read them they say they actually fit AM3 and a few AM2+/AM3 that said in the comments wouldn't actually fit a AM3...

I already have the AS5 ordered, so that's covered.

Thanks for any help!

As far as a cheap but good cpu cooler I would recommend the Enzotech Extreme-X Rev.A with the Enzotech Type-X AM2 Retention Modules, I have this on a AM3 955BE and it works great. Your motherboard doesn't have any heatsinks on the Mofset so if you plan to over clock then I would recommend that you get some for it.

Also you didn't say what RAM you plan on using and this cooler can be an issue if you are using RAM with tall heatsinks on them so keep that in mind. One thing you can do is spin the cooler around so it over hangs the Mofset and this will help give you some additional cooling on them to help in that area.

G Skill Ripjaws, sorry.

I was thinking I would probably get some of the copper heatsinks for the mosfets. With Arctic Silver adhesive it would be 25 bucks. So basically once I get it working and start to OC, I'll get them.

Wow, that heatsink is huge.

Am I to think that you either go with stock or go with something in the 40 dollar range? Meaning, a 15 dollar heatsink and fan isn't going to beat stock?

I used the ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 64 and on a AMD 920 it works fine but on the 955 it wasn't able to do much plus it was loud when pushed. Also getting the clip to latch on was a major pain you have to line up two pins on the heatsink as well as line up the clips all without sliding it off of the cpu or pulling it up letting air get into the TIM on this one. I had actually bought two of them, one of them no matter how many times I remounted it never would cool very well so it got placed in the round file.

Ripjaws isn't that tall on the heat sink and should fit under the cooler without issue, when I say tall I am talking about the Kingston HyperX or OCZ Reaper with those rediculously tall heatsinks. Plus if you only plan on using two sticks then you could use them on the outer two slots so it wouldn't be a problem.

As far as the price of the Enzo and what you get I consider it one of the best coolers for a lower budget cooler, there are others out there that will perform fairly close to it but I don't think you are going to get much of a cooler for less. This is putting you into the 120mm fan range that will allow you to slow the fan down to cut noise but allow it to pick up the fan speed and do cooling when the cpu is pushed hard and not have the jet sound of the smaller fans.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Rocketfish-RF-U...ltDomain_0&hash=item4cf0db2363#ht_1683wt_1137

You can't beat this for the price. It is an exact knock off of the Coolermaster Hyper TX3. Would be way better than the stock OEM cooler. I just put one on my HTPC and was very pleased. They only ship to the US, however. Don't know where you live.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835200056

It's re-badged Akasa X4, which is basically the same as Akasa's older AK-965. One advantage it might have over the one trents posted is a PWM fan for quieter operation. I had one of the Rosewill badged AK-965's and it worked really good for a Core 2 Duo but it can only handle so much with the quads. As far as I know the Athlon II's use the simpler aluminum AMD stock cooler so it would definitely be an upgrade.

The Cooler Master Hyper 212 is also a really good deal @ $30.

As I understand it, Rocketfish is Best Buy's own manufacturing brand... basically made to sell in Best Buy. I had good luck with their stuff before.

trents, do you need a special adapter or whatnot to use it on your AMD? Says Intel, but I assume it's probably universal.

That Rosewill looks great, too. I had one on my old Duron and I could never hear it.

Going to flip a coin I think.

amd has different mounting hardware, so it's a different bracket/backplate.

McGrace said:

As I understand it, Rocketfish is Best Buy's own manufacturing brand... basically made to sell in Best Buy. I had good luck with their stuff before.

trents, do you need a special adapter or whatnot to use it on your AMD? Says Intel, but I assume it's probably universal.

Click to expand...

It has both AMD and Intel mounting hardware. And with the AMD hardware it will mount so that it faces either bottom to top or front to back in the case. Yes, Rocketfish is the Bestbuy storebrand. My bet is its manufactured by Coolermaster for Bestbuy. By the way, it has a 4-wiire PWM fan too.

The Rocketfish looks like an amazing deal with a PWM fan...$11 shipped! Looking closer it's open box though.

Yes, the one I got was open box but nothing wrong with it. It had all the accessories and had been resealed in a molded plastic retail container.