Thermal Conditions

One of the consequences of the Pentium 4 transfer to 90nm Prescott core appeared a considerable growth of the heat dissipation and power consumption. So what does the situation look like with the new Celeron D processors?

Nothing surprising actually: the transition of budget CPUs from Northwood to Prescott core just like in case of Pentium 4 resulted into higher heat generation. However, I would like to stress that this growth is still lower than in case of Pentium 4. For example, Celeron 2.8GHz started to generate 6.7% more heat while the heat generation parameter of the Pentium 4 on 130nm and 90nm cores differs by more than 27.6%.

However, despite this relatively big increase of the heat generation, the boxed Celeron D processors are equipped with a new type of cooler with a copper heart and radially directed ribs guiding the ousted air flow around the cooler and the processor more efficiently.

I also have to say that this cooler looks very much like the coolers for LGA775 platform. It is just a little bit smaller and the fan is provided with somewhat smaller blades.

Speaking about heat dissipation I couldn’t help carrying out a practical experiment. We measured the real temperatures of the four CPUs: Pentium 4 CPU onPrescott core, Pentium 4 CPU on Northwood core, Celeron CPU on Northwood core and Celeron D CPU on Prescott core all working at 2.8GHz. For our tests we used one and the same cooler from the boxed Pentium 4 (Prescott) 2.8E GHz shipment. The values were delivered by the on-die sensor. We measured the minimal CPU temperature in idle state and maximum CPU temperature when the processor got overheated by special utilities:

The results hardly need any comments of ours. Prescott based processors warm up much more at work than their predecessors. This is now true for both: Pentium 4 and Celeron CPU families.