Doug McGarrett wrote:
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Before spending a whole lot of money, see if you can't get some thermal grease, from Thermaloy or someone like them. Take off the heatsink, coat it with a LIGHT layer of thermal grease, and reinstall it on the CPU. Make sure ir fits down tight to the CPU, and is not cockeyed. Try the system again.
Bzzzt!! Sorry, but right after magnets, grease or oil of any kind is the absolute last thing you want to be putting inside your computer -- interiors of fans excepted. There is proper heatsink material on the market for uses like this. Pieter, as far as brand names of fans is concerned, I really have nothing to suggest. Maybe what is available here isn't even on the market where you are; all I know is that you don't want to look for anything other than airflow rates as your primary concern. If you have to get a noisy fan to get decent airflow, so be it -- you are protecting your computer, not your ears. The noise a fan produces is definitely not the first criterion on your list, at best it is second, and a poor second at that. Add up what all your computer equipment cost you, and ask yourself if it is worth the risk to save a few bucks on a fan that is quieter, but moves very little cooler air into your case. If you really need a reference point to start from, go to http://www.a-power.com/ (in Vancouver, BC, Canada). In the bottom left is a popup menu with a choice for "Heatsinks and Cooling Fans". That will at least give you something to start with, except for prices, which are usually much higher in Canada that anywhere else on the planet. All this talk of Athlons and heat makes me wonder if people on this list have forgotten that the Athlon is notorious, always has been, for the heat it produces. I don't know if you can get an AMD processor anymore that does not include a fan, and this is why.