Looks purty, eh? For comparison, here's the old heatsink/fan we're about to rip off the processor:

Our P3, with plastic heat blanket and old heatsink attachment clip thing.	The old heatsink. We had to clean all of the disgusting brown smoker's dust-bunnies out of the fans for this photo. Gross.	Side view. Fans are a little skinny, eh?

All righty then. Let's take a gander at the CPU we are about to abuse.

Here's our P3, sitting happily on an ABIT BX6 rev. 2 in Darkside's system, running at 504MHz. Slacker.	Here's our test system, the godlike Tower o' Power. Fueled by an ABIT BE6-II and a Celery 366PPGA at 550MHz.	No review is complete unless you get good and drunk first.

Our naked P3. Look at it cringe in fear.	We scrubbed off the old dried-up thermal paste with carb cleaner and alcohol (RUBBING alcohol).	Then we applied a coat of the fancy copper thermal paste. A little dab'll do ya.

We took extra caution in applying the copper paste. For one, too much will actually be detrimental, and second the goop is electrically conductive. Accidentally smearing some goop on critical system components would probably result in a beautiful smoke show. I didn't really want to buy Darkside another P3, so I was extra careful. We also decided to test the chip/heatsink in my system rather than Darkside's because I have the new ABIT BE6-II mobo with it's plethora of bus speeds. And I have PC133 SDRAM.

Now for the fun part - let's slap this newfangled heatsink on! First, a closer look.

This is a 52x52x15mm dual ball bearing fan, rated at 6000 RPM and 16 CFM airflow.	Bottom view. Two things of note: The stamped holes that reside directly over the L2 cache chips once installed, and the Mysterious Yellow Thingy.	We immediately scraped off the Mysterious Yellow Thingy, because that's just the kind of people we are.

Well, lookie here! A copper slug!	We thought about filling in the gap around the slug with the Copper Goop™, but decided against it. We weren't sure if it would run all over the place when it got warm and subsequently fry important components.	Here, we attach the temperature sensor for our ABIT BE6-II mobo. We tried to get it as close as possible to the slug without touching it.

The nifty retention clip.	Check out the engineering excellence in how this clip goes on. Really! It's cool! Patent pending.	Just a little twisty-twist, and BAM! We're dialed.

Now let's bust out the test system. We rip the Tower o' Power out from it's comfy little hole.

Hello, my name is Tower o' Power. Wanna dance?	Hey! I'm naked!	The Celery 366@550, sensing it's imminent removal.

Our previously cringing P3, all dressed up and ready to go. Dapper!	Snug as a bug in a rug, ready to rock.	Unlike the giant GlobalWin heatsink and fan on my Celery 366, the P3/RDJD combo doesn't block the third DIMM slot on the super-narrow BE6-II.

Booting up at 504. 450 is for wussies!	We let it run at 504 with the distributed.net RC5 client for 5 minutes to get a good temperature average for the CPU itself and the heatsink.	Alrighty then! Let's go straight for 124x4.5, or 558MHz. Voltage is at 2.05.

Can you FEEL it?! Rock stable with everything we threw at it.	Let's try 576Mhz (128x4.5)	We're go for launch, Houston. 576MHz and stable at 2.1 volts.

130MHz bus, 585MHz. We had to bump the core voltage up to 2.2 volts to be stable, but otherwise no problems. Nice little 135MHz overclock!	Our first attempt at 600MHz (133MHz bus) resulted in a registry error before Win98 booted up. This happened three times in a row. More beer was consumed.	We bumped the core voltage to 2.3, the RAM to CAS3 and the hard drive (UDMA66 IBM) to PIO mode 4. The system booted straight into Win98 but we immediately got a registry error. BAH!

Erm...600 ain't gonna happen without a peltier or something. Ah well...this CPU is now happy at 585Mhz!	...And this is all it took!	Done with the P3 tests, we popped the Celery366@550 back into the trusty Tower o' Power.

But wait! We still have more Copper Goop™! Hmmm....what else can we destroy...	Of course! My Voodoo3 3000 AGP. This puppy is just DYING to hit 190MHz. It'll run all day at 183, but THAT'S JUST NOT GOOD ENOUGH.	So, we yank off the heatsink...

...scrub the chip clean with carb cleaner and alcohol...	...and spread on some Copper Goop™. Uh, a little too much.	Aah, much better.

We'll spare you a thousand more pictures and save this little Voodoo3 overclocking quest for another article. Let's summarize what we found out from the heatsink comparo. We let the system boot into Win98 and fired up Motherboard Monitor 4.13 to take our temperature readings. After five minutes of running the distributed.net RC5 client, we took down the average temperature for the CPU (measured with the internal P3 thermal diode) and the heatsink (measured with the remote probe dongle that comes with the newer ABIT mobos). Here's what we found:

First, the results for the "stock" heatsink. We didn't test anything over 576MHz with the "Brand X" heatsink because the CPU simply became too hot, and we didn't want to risk frying it.

CPU Speed	Bus Speed	Voltage	Heatsink Temp	CPU Temp
450MHz	100MHz	2.0	95.96	105.62
504MHz	112MHz	2.0	98.57	110.16
558MHz	124MHz	2.05	102.06	115.99
576MHz	128MHz	2.1	105.96	120.94 (hot!)

And the results for the RDJD P302:

CPU Speed	Bus Speed	Voltage	Heatsink Temp	CPU Temp
450MHz	100MHz	2.0	86.88	98.06
504MHz	112MHz	2.0	89.55	102.80
558MHz	124MHz	2.05	91.13	108.1
576MHz	128MHz	2.1	92.55	111.43
585MHz	130MHz	2.2	94.99	117.42
590MHz*	131MHz	2.2	95.03	117.55
594MHz**	132MHz	2.2	95.18	117.62
600MHz***	133MHz	2.3	N/A	N/A

* - Not 100% stable
** - Not stable
*** - Would not boot into Win98

Needless to say, the RDJD P302 is staying on this Pentium 3. The CPU temperature averaged about ten degrees cooler with it as opposed to the old heatsink/fan. And now that poor P3 is riding the 558MHz pony rock stable in Darkside's system. With some PC133 RAM, he'd be at 585 no problem..

A note on our testing procedures - After a 5 minute cool-down from each test, we booted the system into Win98 and let it run unmolested for 10 minutes at each tested CPU speed, with both Motherboard Monitor 4.13 and the distributed.net RC5 client running on the desktop (mostly for purty picture purposes). The RC5 client runs the CPU's integer unit at 100% utilization crunching some seriously large numbers, and is a good stress test for an overclocked system. If your system is gonna get too hot or burst into flames, it's gonna do it running the RC5 client. Additionally, we ran IE5, Halflife, Unreal Tournament, and good ol' Quake 2 to further determine system stability at each clockspeed.



Conclusion:

We rate the RDJD P302:

Four Beers

Just four beers because we drank the fifth during the review. The RDJD P302 is definitely a step above the heatsink/fan Darkside previously used. Well worth the money, especially if you are currently running just the OEM heatsink and fan on your SECC2 Pentium 3.

So is there anything we DIDN'T like about the RDJD P302? I think the heatsink can be equipped with a better fan. The installed fan works fine, but after staring in awe at the badass fan on my GlobalWin Socket370 heatsink, it doesn't come close. The sink itself is obviously an excellent design, and with more airflow I think it would have no trouble cooling virtually any CPU. But other than that, this is a great quality heatsink and fan.

We really dug the copper thermal goop as well. Our tube was supplied by Overclockers Hideout.

Discuss this review in the UC Forum

Resources:

RDJD
ABIT
Motherboard Monitor
Distributed.net
Overclockers Hideout