I'm building a system around the MA790FXT-UD5P motherboard with an AMD PhenomII X4 955 processor. Although I don't intend overclocking (well, maybe a little, but not lots) I want a decent cooler as my case is a little congested, so I bought an Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro V2. This is a triple U heat pipe unit with a large fan that is rated for 140W processors, so should be plenty big enough for the 125W PhenomII. I have just been laying things out ready to fit and have discovered that if the cooler is installed the correct way around so the fan blows through the fins towards the back of the PC (the bottom fins are angled to help cool the voltage regulators) the fan overhangs the last memory slot making it impossible to install anything in that slot. The cooler will fit on backwards, but it will then blow against the flow and will end up heating the case. So, anyone with this board, be careful when choosing a cooler.
Now, part of the reason I bought the cooler was I expected the standard unit suppiled with the processor to be a pretty basic lump of alloy with a fan just about up to cooling the CPU in a standard system. To say I was surprised to find a compact 4 heat pipe unit packed with the processor is an understatement. What I would like to know is if anyone knows how well these AMD coolers work. Is it good enough for a mildly overclocked system in a congested case or do I need to find another cooler? Anyone got any recommendations? I can't use water cooling (no room) and the case I'm using doesn't have any side vents. Here's a rundown of what I've got.
19" rackmount case turned on its side to create a very deep mini towe case (think full tower on its side and you're about right). In the front section of the case I've got a 3.5" floppy, SATA DVD/RW with BluRay, SCSI2 CDRW, 2 x SCSI2 CDRoms, SCSI2 Zip Drive & front panel ports. Between the front and rear is a set of three 120mm fans mounted across the case pushing arir from the front to the rear. In the rear section is the motherboard and associated bits & pieces (more on this in a moment), the PSU (850W Corsair), 1 SATA HDD, 2 SCSI2 HDD & 2 SCSI U320 HDD. The motherboard and processor are as above. Installed8GB on the motherboard is 8GB RAM (4x2GB Corsair DHX DDR3 1600MHz), a Gigabyte HD4670 512MB PCIe graphics card and an Adaptec AHA2940U2W PCI SCSI card. Possible future additions include a TV capture card, sound card (if the onboard sound doesn't do what I need) a maybe second graphics card in CrossfireX mode. It will get mixed use with some games (most of the stuff I've got is old, but I might get some newer stuff now I've got a proper 3D card), lots of web browsing, some virtualisation and some audio and video editing, and chances are it will be doing some of these concurrently.
Thanks for the help.
Mark