Update 5/10/99:
Received a Global Win CPM25603-12 from 2CoolTek Saturday and put it up against the Alpha. The difference between the CPM25603-16 and the newer CPM25603-12 is the newer -12 has a 26 cfm fan compared to the 20 cfm on the -16. I tested this cooler under the same conditions as the ones below and it maintained my CPU at 100F compared to 119F for the -16 and 93F for the Alpha. The Alpha is still number one, but for space limited situations (such as dual processor applications) and cost (About half the price of the Alpha/Fan combo) this would be my cooler of choice!
Update 5/3/99:
Just received an email from Mushkin that they have made some revisions to the “Tundra” cooler that consist of a fan revision and voltage changes to the Peltier. I will check one of these out and report back.
Bought my BM6 Mobo and a variety of PPGA Celerons and I was ready to do some serious overclocking… So I thought…. What I do when I overclock a chip is to run Prime 95 in torture mode for about 24 hrs. If it makes it without a round-off error, then I consider it stable.
The BM6 has a nice Thermal Diode under the CPU and if you do a little modification to it, you can get a pretty accurate reading of CPU temperature. You can find out about the modification in Joe’s BM6 review HERE.
The first cooler I used was the OEM cooler that comes on the retail Celeron PPGA. Pretty nice looking cooler but that’s as far as it goes. What I soon found is that when running Prime 95 on a 300 clocked at 504 @ 2.2 volts, the Under CPU diode would show about 127 F in my Super Cooled Aopen HX08 case. The room temp was 75 and the case internal temp was 78 (I have a Radio shack Thermistor mounted in the top of the case and attached to RT2). This was totally UN-acceptable as the CPU would start having errors after running Prime for about 10 mins. Even at 450.
So, it was off to the ‘net and I bought a Global Win CPM25603-16. This is an impressive looking cooler with a 60×25 mm Fan like is on the VEK-12’s. Mounted this cooler (with thermal grease of course) and the Under CPU temp would run around 119 F. An improvement but still would crash after about 20 mins of Prime 95.
I was surfin’ the ‘net looking for some Memory and happened across the Mushkin Website. There they had advertised “Tundra” Peltier Cooler for the Socket 370. I got all excited and thought my problems were solved….. The Tundra cooler arrived and I wasn’t too impressed. It had a pretty large heatsink but only a 60×10-mm fan but I mounted it anyway. Fired up the same Celeron and it ran at about 90 F for 15 mins or so then the temp started climbing until I shut things down when the CPU temp hit 130!! It seems the Mushkin unit could use more fan and/or heatsink. I didn’t do any playing around with it. Obviously a 60×25-mm fan might make this unit perform better but for $48, it should perform better than it does.
I was satisfied with running the C300 at 450 because the Global Win unit would keep it cool enough to run stable at that speed until Joe here at Overclockers turned me on to the Alpha Socket 370 coolers. I got my hands on one of them and I was really impressed! I mounted that badboy with the fan from the Global Win unit blowing AWAY from the cooler as Alpha recommends. I was really impressed when the CPU temp didn’t go any higher than 93 F running Prime! It ran prime for hours with no errors and the temp stayed at 93 or below. So, I figured I’d bump that CPU up to 527 and it is as stable as can be and I was even able to lower the Core voltage to 2.1!
Conclusion:
In my mind there is no other heatsink out there for the Socket 370 Celeron. The only problem I see is that there may be some clearance problems in cases with the power supply mounted sideways like the InWin A500. With proper case cooling these heatsinks should allow us to clock the Socket 370 Celerons to even higher speeds. They aren’t cheap, but it’s money well spent.
This review and comments are just my personal observations and
opinion. As with any products and services, please research throughly
before making any purchases. The reviewer and overclockers.com shall not
and will not be held liable for any damages cause by products reviewed in
this article.
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