Athlon XP-M

Allen1066

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Has anyone built a system using the mobile Athlon. I'm looking at this as a solution for building a PVR. The heat output from one of these should be tiny compared to a non-mobile version. Interested in hearing any feedback, and what sort of cooling (if any) is required.

Allen
 

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I’ve never used one myself, but have looked at them with some interest.

Picking a board that is known to support them well is of course important, it shouldn’t be too hard to actually find the mobile chip in the UK now, for a while they were hard to get hold of on their own.

The Shuttle "AN35N-Ultra" nForce2 Ultra 400 Chipset is meant to be a good motherboard for them.

As for cooling, it will definitely need some, but some of the passive or low noise units mentioned in your PVR thread should work fine.

I’ve never seen what the minimum cooling for these is; most of the stuff I’ve read has been on overlcocking them. If I were you I’d go for a passive one or get the lowest db fan model and try it out, none of them will have ratings for the mobile chip (well I’d be very surprised if they do) but at 35w (depending on the speed you get) something seemingly underrated for the speed should work well.
 

Allen1066

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My thoughts entirely. I've been looking at www.quietpc.com lately and I was wondering if their Flower Cooler, along with a Q-Technology 350W power supply would be enough to keep the whole thing cool (i.e. no specific case fan).
I'd been looking at building a system using the ASUS A7N8X motherboard and putting it in an ATX sized desktop box (because I want to be able to add DVB-S and DVB-T cards).
For the graphics card I was looking at the Sapphire Radeon 9550 which is passively cooled, and a Seagate 200MB hard disk (because they are meant to be very quiet).

What's your opinion of that lot ?
 

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PoloMint

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My XP1800+ puts out over 50w of heat, and running at 100% CPU for 18 hours a day it didn’t actually need a case fan, just a CPU fan and the power supply one. I only added case fans when I played with overclocking and, well, because they have lights on them.

Is it this the flower cooler you were thinking of http://www.quietpc.com/uk/amdcooling.php#6000 or the other one? If it was that one were you going to use the fan provided or not?

Anyway I think you should be OK with any of the flower coolers or similar and that PSU. I would certainly attempt it with that anyway, keeping an eye on temps and having a motherboard monitor log and auto shutdown running also.

That PSU has quite a good noise rating and supplies 28A on the 3.3v rail which is not bad at all for 350W (mine, a QTec unit also rated at 350w, only does 14A which has lead to many problems).

I don’t really know anything about that motherboard I’m afraid.

I have a Samsung SP1614N hard drive and I’m amazed at how quiet it is, I thought my older Seagate one was quiet until I used this. Mines 160GB (not sure if they do a 200GB in the same series so don’t know if it would be the same noise level) and for 7200 spin speed with 8meg of cache it performs well. Are you thinking of getting a hard drive silencer enclosure?

I’ve used a Sapphire Radeon 9800 graphics card, again passively cooled, and was quite impressed with it.

Let us know how you get on with this project, as you can tell I’m interested in the idea :)
 

Allen1066

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Thanks for your interesting feedback. I was thinking of using the flower cooler that you linked to. I was thinking of trying it without the fan and if that doesn't keep it cool enough then I can always install it.

My only worry about using a 7200 rpm hard drive is that it might put out more heat than a 5400 rpm. But this enclosure looks nice http://www.quietpc.com/uk/harddrive.php#zm2hc2. It would quieten and cool at the same time.

I think the Sapphire Radeon 9550 will be fast enough for me. I'm not planning on using it to play games, but I liked the hardware mpeg decoder for DVD playback, and I'm on a tight budget too.

I've just found that you can get a Athlon XP-M 2200+ 35w processor from here http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=19-103-440&depa=1. I have a friend in New York, so I may be calling on his services as I can't find a UK supplier of this chip. It looks amazing and should run really cool. For what I need it should also be powerful enough.
 

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The only places I have found mobiles in the UK are

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/AMD_Athlon_XP__Mobile_.html

and

http://www.cpucitystore.co.uk/catalog/default.php?cPath=28_29_31

but both only supply from 2400 speed upwards, which is 1.45v and as far as I can see 45w rather than the 34w of the 1.35 volt 2200 available in the US. So getting it from newegg via your friend in new york sounds like a good idea. Newegg is certainly popular on the American dominated overclockers forums.

I think trying that flower heatsink without the fan first is a good idea, some carefully applied artic silver thermal compound will help also.

I’ve never used the cooling hard drive enclosures, I’ve read quite mixed reviews of the fan driven ones (mainly that they make a lot of noise and don’t actually do much cooling) but not seen that much about the heatpipe ones. Even if the cooling power is not wonderful it should help keep it quiet.
 

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Allen1066 said:
My thoughts entirely. I've been looking at www.quietpc.com lately and I was wondering if their Flower Cooler, along with a Q-Technology 350W power supply would be enough to keep the whole thing cool (i.e. no specific case fan).
I'd been looking at building a system using the ASUS A7N8X motherboard and putting it in an ATX sized desktop box (because I want to be able to add DVB-S and DVB-T cards).
For the graphics card I was looking at the Sapphire Radeon 9550 which is passively cooled, and a Seagate 200MB hard disk (because they are meant to be very quiet).

What's your opinion of that lot ?
I'm on the Asus A7N8X Deluxe Rev2.0 now, and when I bought it a few months back it was the best Socket A motherboard available IMHO, and I did a LOT of research!

I love this motherboard. It's now even beter value for money. Make sure you get the Rev2.0 or better.

Very stable, and VERY overclockable/tweakable. Make sure you put a Barton in it and avoid the TwinMOS RAM. The board does not like it. Corsair is best.

I buy all my stuff from www.overclockers.co.uk and www.pcnextday.co.uk now.

STICK
 

Allen1066

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How do I make sure I get the revision 2.0 board ? What is TwinMOS ram ?
 

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It may say Rev 2.0 on the ad, or you could ask them. Unlikely to be anything else now. Only very old stock or second hand stuff will be Rev1.x, but they don't fully support 400 memory IIRC.

TwinMOS is a brand of memory, and unfortunaltly I bought 2 x 512MB sticks!
Not suitable for the Nvidia chipset they told me (AFTER I bought it!)

Having said that, after some initial hassle with it, it's been sweet ever since.

Yeah, sorry, when I said Barton, I forgot the whole point of this was to put an M in it, but I think the XP2500 is a cracking CPU. Massive overclock potential, peanuts to buy, and because it's the lowest-rated of the Bartons, it runs pretty cool at stock speeds too.
 

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Wow, stonking price for a top quality board. Not sure how it compares to other stores now, but half the price I paid!

On the site it says "requires BIOS update for 400 MHz" which is what I was saying above. That tends to indicate that it's not a Rev2 (if I remember correctly, and it was a while ago - best check on the ASUS bios download website).

In reality you will almost certainly find that the boards ARE Rev2, and 'Special Reserve' have just never updated their description. It's printed on the board, and I think you can work it out from certain digits in the serial number.

Good luck with your project.

STICK
 

Allen1066

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It's the cheapest I've seen anywhere, so I think I'll go for it. I'm probably not going to use DDR400, more likely DDR333 or even DDR266. I presume 2 sticks would be best to take advantage of the dual memory thingy ?

Allen
 

Allen1066

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BGonaSTICK said:
On the site it says "requires BIOS update for 400 MHz" which is what I was saying above. That tends to indicate that it's not a Rev2 (if I remember correctly, and it was a while ago - best check on the ASUS bios download website).
If I can update an old board with a BIOS update would it be worth going for the cheaper old bard and upgrading it myself ?

Allen
 

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Allen1066 said:
I've just found that you can get a Athlon XP-M 2200+ 35w processor from here http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=19-103-440&depa=1. I have a friend in New York, so I may be calling on his services as I can't find a UK supplier of this chip. It looks amazing and should run really cool. For what I need it should also be powerful enough.
Allen,
Like you, I was in search of a cool chip and found my way to the 35W XP-M2200+ at the newegg web site. Alas, no shipping outside the US. Were you able to get hold of one?

Anyone else know of a UK source of 35W XP-Ms??

Thanks.
 

Allen1066

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Luckily I have a friend in New York who ordered it for me. I've not got it yet, but it should arrive soon. Just trying to decide exactly which motherboard would be best now.

I'm currently thinking of using the DFI NF2 Ultra Infinity. It's cheaper than the Abit and Asus boards and has everything I need (available from www.overclockers.co.uk) and is able to work at low voltages happily.
 

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Hi m8,

Sorry, I missed your earlier posts. The dual memory thingy only works with DDR400, but it doesn't give the performance increase that the bandwidth increase promises. Sometimes, it can even be SLOWER!
STICK
 
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