Just as they faced up to the inevitability that they could no longer keep producing ever faster processors, Intel released the “Pentium D” – a dual Pentium CPU.
The two Pentiums were not on the same die though and the whole thing gobbled energy, heated quickly and generally performed pretty poorly in comparison to the following on generation of two-CPUs-on-the-same-piece-of-silicon.
In 2005, though, having found a new job after a brief post-election period of enforced idleness, I bought a Pentium D based motherboard from the now late and lamented Morgan Computers on New Oxford Street. Morgans specialised in selling cheap end of line machines and I was both happy with the performance (earlier in the year I was building machines out of Pentium 90s!) and the price.
But the heat was a perennial problem. As the box clogged up with dust, as it inevitably did, or the heatsink‘s efficiency declined, the machine would first slow (as the cores were throttled) or just peg out at a random time.
Latterly it wasn’t even lasting 10 minutes or less with X Windows running – even though I’d invested in a much bigger heatsink.
So, tonight it was dismembered – the disk being fed into a standalone mounter so I could extract what I needed, the NVidia card removed (and the RAM) and the heavy frame chucked out. I would guess it will be gone by the morning, so efficient are the metal gatherers round here.
Related articles
- AMD: The Rise, Fall and Future of an Industry Giant (techspot.com)
- Like it or not, nonreplaceable CPUs may be the future of desktops (arstechnica.com)
- Intel explains Claremont, the near threshold ‘solar’ Pentium (semiaccurate.com)
- Forget the PS4 and the Xbox 720, build your own Steambox on the cheap (theverge.com)
- Homebuilt Silent PC is All Heatsink (uberreview.com)
- MSI Introduces Hetis H61 Ultra Barebone PC (hothardware.com)
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