Heatsink okay?

[Jere F. Moore]

I have an old Acer desktop that I like a lot and would like to upgrade. It has a Foxconn Socket 939 motherboard that came with an AMD Sempron 64 3200+ which I believe is rated for 59 watts. I would like to upgrade to either an Athlon 64 x2 4200 or 4600, rated at 89 watts or 110 watts, respectively, and was wondering if the current heatsink and fan would be okay? From the heatsink: Acer HI.2800C.003 Rev. A, Foxconn 2006 07 06.

Any and all information will be greatly appreciated.

 

[cdawall]

Those chips all had roughly the same heatsink until you stepped into the FX60/62's.

 

[Bill_Bright]

While I am a fan (no pun intended) of OEM coolers, and while it is true that many AMD processors use "roughly the same heatsink", I would be cautious because as you noted, there is a significant difference between 59W and 89W, and especially 59 and 110W. The higher wattage models may have come with a thicker fan and/or one that spins faster to grab and push more air across the same heatsink to dissipate the greater amount of heat generated.

But it certainly would not hurt to try this cooler and see what happens. Just carefully monitor your temperatures in real-time with a decent HW monitor like CoreTemp (which is what I use) or Speccy which is great for checking all other system temps and specs. I am pretty sure that cooler will work fine (if you have an adequate flow of cool air flowing through the case, and a proper application of TIM - thermal interface material) with normal "office" type tasks like surfing the net or reading email. But if your temps start going too high when you push the CPU (when gaming or other demanding tasks), then you may need to purchase a more efficient cooler.

 

[cdawall]

For that generation the heatsink for a the single cores and dual cores were the same cooler. Only thing that would be different is what acer actually used.