With the adoption of 90 nm process technologies, the AMD Athlon 64 CPUs have turned into real power saving processors. Their modest power intake also reduces the amount of cooling needed, which is a real benefit. But with the introduction of dual core Athlon 64 X2 processors, power intake has increased once again - this is understandable, given that there are two CPU cores at work under a single chip cover.

Given the dual core trend, we decided it was time to look into current cooling solutions again. To that end, we tested six available products for AMD CPUs to see how they fared.