Wow...

AMD has really improved their ease of use in system building.

My old system started systenmatically dying, piece, after piece, so I decided to take the plunge and build a new system.



Old system:

Asus A7N8X 2.0 Deluxe
1gb pc2700 no name DDR running in dual channel
Athlon XP 2500+ (had a blemished core)
ATI X800 Pro
80gb Maxtor ATA 133 w/ 8mb cache
80gb WD ATA 100 w/ 8mb cache

yada, yada.

New system:

MSI K8N Neo 2 Platinum
1gb PC3200 Corsair Value ram running in dual channel (the price was right and its stable)
Athlon 64 3800+
ATI X800 Pro
300gb Maxtor SATA 150 w/ 16mb cache
yada, yada

You may ask why i went with that motherboard. Mainly, because a new comparable video card is too expensive and the X800Pro is a great performer still for me to even consider pci express.

First things I noticed:

No crunching an AMD 64 core! Put the heatsink down, attached both sides, flipped the lever. Voila! No pressure, no screwdriver slipping off the heatsink, etc. Best feature of ther AMD 64, imo.

The second thing is, this computer is running on stock cooling, plus 4 80mm fans, the same as the last system.

In its prime, the Athlon Xp 2500+ with stock cooling (amd heatsink), always idles at about ~50c. When the core got messed up, it went up about 5-7 degrees. In the end, it was idling at 70c and pretty much cooked itself.

This system, idle, averages about 40c, but has dropped down to 36c! Thats with the AMD heatsink and the thermal pad on it.

I am very, very impressed.

The dynamic overclocking feature of this board is beautiful, but thats a story for another day.

 

I agree. I put together my first athlon 64 a month ago. Very easy to install the heatsink and I also left the stock thermal pad on and I run 27 to 35c. I used a gigabyte board, no jumpers to configure which is nice. I used my ddr 2100 ram from another build and the thing runs great. Goodbye socket A hello 64.

 

Yeah, I couldn't believe how easy it was. I was like...thats it?!

 

I was always afraid of slipping with the old flat head screwdriver when using the socket A heatsinks. That was the worst part of the whole process. Like you, I was amazed how easy the installation was on the new processors.

 

I had doubts when I flipped the lever I thought you shouldn't have to push this hard,but I just went for broke and it snapped into place,I couldn'tbelieve how solid it is on the msi,when I handled it I picked the mobo up with the heatsink,it felt like a handle.

 

That's a great advancement!
Good news for builders. That's the one thing that makes me nervous, mounting the dang heatsink!

 

No need to be nervous anymore. It is incredibly simple now. I hear ya, mounting the heatsink on a socket A cpu was just stressful sometimes.