Now and then: Processor coolers


A retro post on Niko’s blog gave me some inspiration for a retro post on my blog. Here are two pictures of processor coolers – a modern one and one from more than ten years ago.

 On the left you can see my first (and only) AMD CPU together with its cooler. This chip comes from my second PC and is a 5×86 with a clockspeed of 133MHz. The aluminium heatsink is pretty tiny, it’s just 1cm thick and has a (by today’s standards) very small fan. I also noticed that there’s no thermal grease between the CPU and the heatsink – I’m not sure if that was normal back then or whether the PC shop was doing sloppy work.

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On the right you can see the Noctua NH-U12F – a big modern tower cooler with copper base, four big copper heatpipes and a 120mm fan. This beast weighs 790g and provides pretty silent cooling.

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