While reading some cooling posts on this forum, I thought back at the time back when we didn't need any sort of cooling for our PC's with 386 / 486 chips in it... Well, I don't know that time by myself but I have a 486 laying here with open case (a perfect PC to experiment with) and while running, I can actually touch the 486-chip... mmmmmmm how much lower will the costs be if a processor didn't made any heat.... that must be heaven
You give a little, you get a little....how many 486s would it take to match the speed of a single Athlon? Lots. Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots. And a few more. The last passively cooled CPU I owned was a P90. Mind you....A Geforce 3 does not produce a great deal of heat, and that is a very, very complex processor...more complex than a P4 or an Athlon, by some way. Certainly a great deal more powerful than a 486, and you could easily passively cool it, if it were not stuck underneath a card in limited space (heat rises, but the chips go on the bottom of the card....sigh....ISA was the right way around). My GF3 is passively cooled, but I have a blowhole. Just proves that it can be done though, with appropriate airflow.
I remember the days of my 486 DX2 66, with the whole 8 megs of RAM It was passively cooled, altho it did have an ATX power supply with a fan in there... plus the hard drive made a hell of a crackle... we complain about todays harddrives being noisy, but that.... OMG it got annoying after about 5 minutes constant cackle cackle cackle
The 486 was passively cooled. It's just that the surface area of the packaging was enough, so no supplementary heatsink was required. If it hadn't been cooled at all, it would have melted....
So was the pentium, well the early ones were Cooooorrrrr the days of my 186... Takes me back a long long way....
I have but one thing to say : Via C3 There's a review on PC Powerzone.... it does 933Mhz with passive cooling. Downside is it's not as fast as a 750 Duron. it does well for most things though.
Mmmm...That's a point. My mate's Dell PII 333 came with just an hooj heatsink and a case-fan, no fan on the CPU itself. Kinda like my GF3 now......
can you get a pic of that online Fly ? or describe the cooling in there....what intakes / exhausts, and what the heatsink on the P-III is
my p2 isn't passivly cooled it has a cooler on it, and it had to be replaced once would it worked without activly cooling? it's a PII 233
I'll post a pic as soon as I am at home for more than an Hour (two jobs are creating havoc with my Counterstrike skills!!!). I thought it was weird when I moved the stuff out of the Gateway box into the Lian-Li..."what? No fan?", saying that there was a hood that directed the warm air out of the case through the PSU fan. It works fine now without tho so the Lian-Li must be doing it's magic.
The Fujitsu Scenic D has a 1G P3 with no HS fan, but they duct airflow from a big HS straight to an inlet hole in the PSU. So the one fan does 2 jobs. Most Compaq have ducted psu fan cooling for the cpu.