dual core processor with a 54W TDP, and it was very silent, there was no need for the fan to speed up beyond ~1500RPM. So when I decided to upgrade to the AMD Athlon X4 845
quad core processor, which had a 65W official TDP, I thought the RPM may go up slightly, but nothing noticeable, as the Cooler Master Hyper TX2 can handle up to 125W TDP processors. That was nice thought ... but in reality, my new AMD processor can go up to 90W TDP, twice the TDP of my old Haswell Celeron.
This is how my system is put together now. You can see how stupid it is to have such a small system in a large ATX case, but I'm not going to invest in a new one, as this one cost me like 5 USD 10 years ago and does its job. The most I'm willing to do is a DIY mATX project. It was done already by many DIY-ers, but I think I can bring some new ideas to the table. All I'll need for this to happen is time and money ... only one of which is missing (money).
With the default settings the AMD Athlon X4 845
Carrizo CPU was getting really hot, as the FAN profile had a target of 70*C. While gaming, the temperature stayed around 65*C, which I was very uncomfortable with.My solution was to set the CPU TDP to 45W from the UEFI BIOS and target CPU temperature to 60*C. Now temperatures stay under 60 degrees, and the FAN is almost always under 65% speed, 1500-2200RPM ... BUT when I'm playing DOTA 2 and running other applications too (~90% CPU utilization), the fan ramps up to 100%, above 3000RPM.
I also have to mention that on my current MSI A68HM-E33
motherboard doesn't really react to the TDP setting. The main difference I have noticed between 45W/65W is that the CPU gets hot quicker with the 65W setting, but temps and fan RPM stay at almost exactly the same level as with the 45W TDP setting, maybe 1-2 degrees higher.