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PC Q&A
by Jim Sanders, jsanders@ligasmicro.com - October 03, 2001 at 18:59:45:
Last month I covered the overheating problems I was having with my 1.2GHz system. See last months article for a description of the system. The need was to stop the crashes and the high capacity heatsink did that. I was not very happy that the AMD provided cooling solution included with their \ldblquote factory boxed\rdblquote CPU seemed inadequate but I was not sure under what circumstances it was supposed to work. I subsequently went to the AMD web site and clicked my way to the technical document that defined the cooling requirements of the Athlon CPU. The document is: "AMD Thermal, Mechanical, and Chassis Cooling Design Guide" aka "23794.pdf"At the time it was relatively easy to find. However, I made the mistake of downloading it to a floppy disk that I did not label and couldn\rquote t remember exactly what I had done with it. No problem, I will just go back to the AMD web site and download it again. That is, after all, one of the really neat things about the internet, you don\rquote t have to save all that stuff in your local files, you can just go back to the source and get it again if needed. Well, almost! When I went back to the AMD web site, they had revised it to tout the \ldblquote Athlon 4". I spent over an hour clicking in circles down what I thought were the same paths that I had taken before. I found all kinds of pages that fell into what I would call the marketing PR/hype pages and references to stuff that sounded like it was in the area I was interested in, but without any links. It seemed like someone at AMD had decided that they didn't want the great unwashed of the world to have access to the facts. I went back to searchi ng for the floppy disk and finally found it. Knowing the exact title of the file and the file name to take keywords from, I was able to verify that the file is still there. Given that if AMD is going to have a list of approved heatsinks, they must have a document that defines the requirements of these units, YOU might find it interesting to see if you can locate it before using the following cheat. http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/23794.pdf
The bottom line is that the spec said that as long as the heatsink meets their specs (and I must assume (hate that word) that the one they provide does), and the ambient temperature in the case does not exceed 42 degrees C (107.6 F, mine reached 101.2 F), and that the interface material thermal resistance\rdblquote =0.48 deg. C/W for the 55W CPU or =0.35 deg. C/W for the 76W CPU, everything should be cool. But for my machine it is not, in either context. At this time, I am of the opinion that the CPU in my machine is not as good as AMD\rquote s specs say it should be. Convincing AMD of that may be easier said than done. I found an Intel page that gives a pretty good overall of the cooling considerations that need to be addressed in order to keep temperatures with in limits. Check out: http://developer.intel.com/technology/itj/q32000/articles/art_4.htm.
On another topic, about a year ago I first heard of the Panasonic "FD32MB". A floppy disk that was going to allow us to take some of the hundreds of 1.44M floppies that have been accumulated and re-format them as 32 Megabyte media. I have been waiting and waiting and waiting to learn that one of my distributers had the unit in stock. In August I learned that Que! Is marketing the "Panasonic SuperDisk Drive Slim USB (External) aka 240MB USB SuperDisk Drive LKM-FK73-D\rdblquote under their brand name. This unit can deal with a 720K, 1.44M, 32M (reformatted 1.44M), LS120M, and LS240M media and uses a USB port for data and power. The "Que!" name data can be found at: http://www.qps-inc.com. Look under external USB solutions. They are currently offering a $30 rebate coupon at: http://www.qps-inc.com/rebates/rebate240.pdf. Thirty dollars off of a street price of $160 makes this an "I want it item" for me. I will see if I can scrape together the necessary coin to buy one before the next SIG. A historical FYI. In 1980 I paid $90 for 16 Kbytes of RAM. $10 apiece for eight of the 16Kx1bit chips plus $10 in gas to drive to the San Fernando Valley for the Grand Opening sale of a new computer store. Limit, one set of chips per customer. Last week I saw an ad for 256 Mbyte of PC133 SDRAM for $45 in a local store. If you care to check the math, that is sixteen thousand times as much memory, for one half the price! Kind of mind boggling when you think about it.
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