AMD Athlon X4 845 Carrizo finally in my system!

After reading a lot of negative reviews about delivery and feeling pessimistic about my chances, the courier phoned me Saturday morning and arrived in 5 minutes with two separate packages: one sealed bag with the CPU and another sealed bag with the mainboard. So the components arrived in less than 48 hours. My only complaint is that the warranty papers "weren't straight" and the boxes were quite banged up.

I assembled the parts outside the case. And stared at it for a while ...

Then I realized the processor was getting too hot and the cooler too noisy, so I switched the cooler to the Cooler Master Hyper TX2, with a little mod to hold it in place. The stock cooler's original mounting mechanism was too tall for my cooler, as it is a 95W TDP model. If the stock cooler was the 65W TDP model it would have worked ... so after a little DIY magic I mounted the cooler with two zip ties and a strong piece of metal to reach across.

So now the video card is very close to the modded CPU cooler and temperatures were still high, so I did two more modifications to my PC.

I voided the warranty of the power supply, as I took it apart, bent the heatsink fins to have more space for the fan and mounted it with silicone screws. Now the 12cm fan can spin at full speed without murdering my ears. I also added a second 12cm in the front of the case (where the 5.25" bays are), which also pulls out warm air, not at full speed though.

NOTE: my PC is above the monitors on a shelf, so none of the fans will blow in my direction, just sideways.

With the current configuration, my system is about 2x faster than my old dual core Haswell Celeron G1820. I can play DOTA 2 (second lowest graphics setting) and watch a 720p Youtube video on the other monitor without any issues. With 25*C room temperature the video card stays under 50*C and the CPU under 65*C at full load. I did do a little overclock via FSB, as I felt cheated when I saw the processor's frequency at 3.75GHz instead of 3.8GHz... so I increased the FSB from 100MHz to 101MHz 😎 now it's at 3833MHz.

Today I put my PC together with the parts I had at hand, but in the future I'll replace both 12cm fans and get a better mounting mechanism for the Cooler Master Hyper TX2. All the fans in my system are the cheapest...

Some time further in the future I'll upgrade my ATI Radeon HD 5550 512MB GDDR5 video card and possibly my 60GB SSD too, but for now it's good as it is, I started and will continue enjoying it 😎