It's the year 2004 and Socket A/462 is still around in larger percentages then expected by most people "in the know". The move towards AMD's own Athlon 64 is happening, but very slow due to the high prices and the constant changes of the new platform. If you want to buy a new future-proof and upgradeable A64 PC you need to invest in a Socket 939 motherboard and CPU with support for PCI-E graphics boards. As far as I know these setups are very expensive and do not offer performance increases which warrant the high cost.
So here we are with yet again an AMD Socket A roundup. Last time in
December 2003 we saw that the field was dominated by the Thermalright SP-97 heatsink which sports heat pipe technology. Nowadays a lot of manufactures have caught up and we have a wide variety of heatsinks available which are based upon the successful heat pipe tech.
As with our last roundup we have 2 different categories of coolers for you, high end models which aim at bringing excellent performance at low noise levels. And lower end products that can offer a worthwhile alternative to the stock AMD heatsink.
High end:
Aerocool HT-101 ($50)
Aerocool DP-102 ($50)
TTIC NPH-201 ($35)
Sharkoon HPS1 ($35)
Thermalright SP-97 ($50)
Low/Mid end
Thermalright ALX800 ($20)
TTIC NPH-2 ($30)
PrimeCooler MegaCool I+ (€12)
PrimeCooler MegaCool II+ (€15)
PrimeCooler MegaCool III+ (€30)
If you can't seem to find the heatsink listed in the pictures, take a look here, it's under there somewhere :-).
Prices are average values I encountered from different retailers, the price in your country/region may differ. So without further delay, we start our roundup ->