Cause this one is kind of big and keeps getting in the way




Anyway as you can probably tell or have heard, I've been having some cooling issues with my computer. I have two spots open for fans in the front and back, so I'm going to get fans for there. Are PCI slot fans worth it? How about cd bay fans?

Hm... maybe I'll get LED fanz to light up my case y0

I has that case. I like it except for the whole weighing a ****-ton thing. Once upon a time I had fans in all of the slots on it. Now it has zero case fans because now it's running an Atom D510 so there's absolutely no need for active cooling inside of it outside of the fan in the power supply.

You should only need fans in the back, not in the front. Check out Silent PC Review for quiet fans. I like the Scythe S-Flex series, Newegg stocks most of them I think. They come in low, medium and high speeds and all of them are about the most quiet you can get for that amount of air flow.

And clean out the filter in the front (if you haven't already)! That thing can get nasty and really hurt your airflow.

I have an extra 120mm blue LED fan. Do you need it?

Yup! Got a bunch of compressed air, ready to eradicate any dust stuck in there. Wouldn't a front mounted fan help pull air in though?

Beware of the spiders.

I took my PC out to the garage the other day to hit it with some compressed air by the time I was done there was a cloud of dust in the garage because of how filthy that thing had got.

I used front mount fans for hard drive cooling

Unless you have a ton of hard drives really close together or the PC is in some abnormally hot room, you don't need hard drive cooling. It's a common misconception that hotter drives have a shorter life. It's a bell curve, with 55C being the top of it. Reliability increases the hotter it gets until 55C, after which it begins to drop again.

Typically front fans are configured as intake and rear fans configured as exhaust.

Most PCI fans solutions are designed to cool videocards.

mb, what exactly is running hot? Maybe a small fan on your north/southbridge heatsink might help with your stability problems.

From speed fan it looks like my GPU and CPU are both running hot. I'm getting the dust out of the case tomorrow so I'll see how they run when they're clean. Fans are cheap enough that I'll at least get 1 more case fan.

Good to know. Thanks for the info. Maybe that help explains why my 3 year old WD took a crap this week

I don't think temperature is a very high cause of hard drive failure. It's not as if running it too cool or too warm is going to drastically reduce the life. It probably failed because it's a hard drive with moving parts and sometimes they just die.

Added a fan to the back. Added a PCI Slot cooler. Reapplied Thermal Paste. dusted the crap out of the case. just tried to boot it and got a CPU over temperature error BIOS is reading the CPU at about 100C..............

Any suggestions? All of the fans are spinning and the CPU heat sink is on securely. Am I boned and need to upgrade some components?

I can't imagine what a body heat signature of that size must do to the ambient temperature in the room...

What!? There are moving parts in a HDD! Blashphemy!

Is it possible you have a bad thermal sensor? Your talking about the E8400 right? Unless you disable thermal protection in BIOS - the CPU should start throttling around 85C, you would notice the slowdown. And ~100C you are definately at risk of the cpu shutting down anytime to protect itself.

If the tempature sensor is accurate, something must be wrong with the cpu heatsink- maybe its not making full contact with the chip. Case fans have very little effect on CPU tempature.

If your CPU heatsink/fan really is fine- i would recommend the generic 'clear cmos' advice on the hopes that is it just a BIOS or sensor issue.

Fingers crossed that it's just a sensor. I never disabled any of the temperature protection stuff and the computer has never shut itself down for overheating.

Checking the heat sink now, ill try the CMOS next.

also whoever designed the heatsink for the intel core2 chips needs to be stabbed.

agreed. retarded design.

Not sure if you've done this yet or not, but take off the CPU/GPU heatsinks and clear out any dust stuck in there. That problem always plagued me.

Now I have a new carpet and the dust levels have gone way down so hopefully I won't have to keep cleaning out every few months.

Yeah meant to update this

Used an air compressor to dust the crap out of the case. Turns out the heat sink FELT secured with all the pins locked, but they werent anchoring into the motherboard holes. Now that I've managed to attach the heatsink properly, the CPU has been running at about 40C.