One of our Home Media Center PCs uses nVidia’s nForce 4 chipset, which is notoriously warm due to the passive heatsink Chaintech has placed on their motherboard. Overclock-friendly boards have active cooling onboard, and we have reached a brick wall when overclocking this board, so it is a good candidtate for an upgrade. Our test system includes:
- Chaintech VF4-Ultra motherboard (nForce 4)
- AMD Atlon 64 X2 3800+
- 1GB DDR-400 memory
- Soundblaster Live!
- Hauppauge Win-PVR-250 MPEG capture board
- ATI X1600 PCIe video card
- Sony DVD-RW drive
- 2x Seagate Barracuda 250GB 7800.8 HDDs
As our test data shows, we obtained impressive results with the Thermalright HR-05 chipset heatsink. During idle, the HR-05 bested the stock heatsink by a whooping 20ºF which kept the Northbridge chipset below 100ºF. While the stock heatsink suffered at full load, the HR-05 kept it cool at just 103ºF. Since the HR-05 kept the Northbridge temperatures below 100º at full load, we decided to overclock and over-volt the Northbridge to 2.0V at 250MHz. At overclocked setting, the HR-05 held itself at just 98ºC during idle and 106ºC during full load.
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Thermalright HR-05 Performance Analysis
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