Introduction:
Ok, so you've decided to give Intel another chance with their nifty new 1.6A Northwood CPU... what will you use to cool it? Anyone who has tried to push the AMD Athlons to their highest potential knows the fans kept getting louder and louder! What we are looking for is a solid cooling solution without spending a fortune and inviting a weedwacker into your PC Room? Here are 2 very reasonably priced aftermarket coolers provided by our good friends at CrazyPC Computers: the Thermaltake P4 Dragon 478 ($20.95) and the DR Thermal TI-V8639L ($24.95).
Both are designed for the Pentium 4 Northwood Socket 478. The Socket 478 specification for heatsinks is interesting because all heatsink must fit into a standard receiver (unless you are willing to do some serious modification on your motherboard). This makes installation of standard cooling units literally a snap. All you need to do is snap the arms on the heatsink cover into the receiver and swing the tension arms 180 degrees and you're done. This is a tremendous improvement over Socket A heatsinks, even though it just doesn't seem right to install a heatsink without a big screwdriver, popsicle sticks for guides, and a box on Band-Aids nearby. Here are a couple of shots from the Intel Website which show how easy it is:
Let's take a look at the coolers that will be involved in our review here.
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