Intel's new stock cooler

Keywords: Intel stock cooler Penryn 45nm E8400
As the new 45nm Penryn based CPUs reach the market, so does it's new cooler.
The design is similar but it looses half of it's height and the copper core. It's nothing that will make the new CPUs run in stress, since most of them run on half the juice of the old 65nm Core 2.
The problem is noise. We have got to a point where even Intel's stock cooler features quite a decent amount of R&D, turned into a cooler that is a decent performer. It was designed initially with Prescott based CPUs in mind, so it had to perform. Cutting it in half will make it perform worse, thus increasing the noise generated - I wouldn't like to see the cooling industry retract itself to the dark place where it once was. The money was already spent on R&D so there is no need to spend more. There is, however, to keep adapting current technology to new sockets.

Although Intel had the decency to keep most of the design intact, if this becomes a trend, we will continuously see the thermal output of the boxes go down, while the noise generated is still quite high. I'm sure some remember what the cooler of a Pentium XE 965 sounded like, a few years ago. A video was around the net, at the time, which provided some good laughs for AMD users and some nightmares for Intel ones.

We are at a good place now, it's not so hard anymore to build a silent PC from stock parts, even GPUs are going nicely too. The 8800GT's cooler provides silence and the card is no slouch, let's hope it stays this way.