Author Topic: Sempron 140, Athlon II 160u/170u  (Read 3994 times)

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Offline BigBrother

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Sempron 140, Athlon II 160u/170u
« on: Fri, 17 December 2010, 02:39:10 »
Getting a new motherboard soon and i need a low TDP processor. it's gonna be stuck somewhere i'll never see it again unless i try.

pretty much anything that's low (<45W) TDP on this list: http://www.gigabyte.us/support-downloads/cpu-support-popup.aspx?pid=3320

Offline taswyn

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Sempron 140, Athlon II 160u/170u
« Reply #1 on: Fri, 17 December 2010, 06:39:10 »
The 160/260u series chips seem to be difficult to find, maybe you'll get lucky and someone will have one for you used, but newegg at least has the Sempron for cheap ^^

So long as the motherboard is flexible enough in voltage and timing, remember you can usually underclock and then undervolt to lower effective TDP and increase reliability too, if you're concerned that the Sempron is a little high wattage for your needs.

Offline BigBrother

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Sempron 140, Athlon II 160u/170u
« Reply #2 on: Fri, 17 December 2010, 12:52:21 »
here i thought the 160u/170u would be my shot in the dark. also, the motherboard (a link located at the top-right of the page from the originally provided link for the motherboard's CPU support info) supposedly claims to have set the new bar for CPU tweaking.

Offline taswyn

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Sempron 140, Athlon II 160u/170u
« Reply #3 on: Sat, 18 December 2010, 06:44:53 »
Yes, I glanced through the motherboard's manual when I made that post, but all it seemed to say about the configurable voltages was "what was allowed by the particular CPU being used." So I'm not sure whether the bios has any restrictions in place or will allow you the full range of the voltage regulators regardless of the particular CPU, or how low it can go.

Some light googling basically showed people trying to find the 160u/260u series and the only consumer source they were coming up with being ebay, where all I could find from a quick search were the 260u/270u (which have higher TDP than the 160u/170u, but you might be able to disable a core in bios, since that's all the 160u effectively is apparently) from HK. If it were me, I think I would give undervolting/underclocking one of the Semprons a try. They're already over 50% higher clocked than the 160u, scaling that back to comparable clocking alone should reduce the heat output reasonably, depending on how low they'll undervolt at that speed you may be able to get them down to about the same as the 160u. Especially since they're only $36 shipped ^.^

Unfortunately I don't have any actual experience with using AMD platforms for this type of situation, so I don't know the voltage tolerances people have been able to use without doing some research. I've managed to do it fairly well with a couple different intel platforms. Are you going to be using passive cooling?

Also, depending on your situation, one solution that can actually be fairly cost effective for something enclosed with low heat dispersion is procuring a used/cheap replacement laptop motherboard with ULV CPU. But you already said you had a motherboard, and I assume a case/etc for it, and using a laptop is fairly limiting in certain ways.

Hopefully all of that is helpful in some way =)

Offline BigBrother

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Sempron 140, Athlon II 160u/170u
« Reply #4 on: Sat, 18 December 2010, 10:06:21 »
going straight to the Sempron 140, it seems that AMD only makes no less than dual-core CPUs since it came out with its first dual-core in 2005; the Sempron 140 is a dual-core with one core locked/disabled. I'm going to buy the Sempron 140 and unlock its second core and then downclock it a bit (2GHz sounds good).

As for cooling: i have a couple unused coolers. computer case probably won't be used; i'll make a literal [wood] box for the entire system.

Offline taswyn

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Sempron 140, Athlon II 160u/170u
« Reply #5 on: Sun, 19 December 2010, 08:47:42 »
Good luck! It sounds neat, post pics when you get done xD

Quote
I'm going to buy the Sempron 140 and unlock its second core


Well, the TDP jump from that isn't really multiplicative (some shared logic/etc), but depending on what it's getting used for why not just leave it as single, keep the TDP low? I can't function without at least dual core for anything I'm really *using,* but if it's something that's being used in a very linear fashion (HTPC/etc) for mostly single threaded things it's not like the gains from a second core are that much usually.

Although if you really want dual core, it *does* look like the 2**e series is showing up now some places, in some models. More expensive than the Sempron, but same TDP with two cores active apparently =O

Offline BigBrother

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Sempron 140, Athlon II 160u/170u
« Reply #6 on: Sun, 19 December 2010, 08:57:27 »
I'm sure the FTP server software on Debian can at least utilize dual-core.

If I could, I'd find a motherboard that'd support my 3500+ (2.2GHz/940/am2) but I kinda like the multiple PCIe x1 slots available. Although I may not be using the full possibility of the board (6 SATA2 on-board + (4* PCIe x1 * RAID cards^adapter's available SATA2 connectors)), I still like the thought of having more than enough room to expand.