Athlon 64 90nm Thermals Part II: Not as Rosy as We Thought.
 

On Friday we posted a cautiously optimistic quick look at Athlon 64 thermals, but stated we were going to return for a more in-depth appraisal. The delay (and split article) was caused by hardware compatibility issues that had us swapping motherboards three times in order to find a board that supported both chips in BIOS and didn’t have any voltage issues (our A8V beta BIOS supported both, but insisted on running the 90nm Winchester at 1.60v. As you can imagine, this is a less-than-healthy voltage for our 90nm part. We've spent more time looking into the chip across a variety of speeds using the MSI Neo2, and would like to share the results.

Before we discuss our findings, lets talk a bit more about the 90nm problem in general. Because my own background in electricity and physics is lacking, I’ve kept the discussion high-level

http://www.sudhian.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=610