For your CPU? The stock CPU cooler makes almost no noise.

Which is fine if you're running it stock, which I don't plan on doing...

The 3770k generates a lot of heat relative to its small surface area, so it's a bit harder to get rid of that heat than on an older 45nm or 32nm i7 since your contact patch is smaller. Every little bit of added cooling power helps, and closed loop liquid cooling systems are braindead easy to deal with.

I guess that's fair given how cheap the thing is. A large heatsink would cost a similar amount.

They may be small, but they're loud as ****.

I picked up an H60 for about $30 after combo deal, which is a great deal considering I would have spent $25 on a decent heatsink anyway.

Yeah, and I much prefer how clean they make the inside of a case compared to a massive heat sink with multiple fans on it sticking right on top of the motherboard.

So I built that Core 2, it's pretty rad.
What's a good temp for stock cooler? It seems to idle at 60ish and it's bugging me. ****ty intel heatsink or bad seating?
E: Reseated, except this time I allowed the heatsink to spread the paste, instead of doing it manually. It now idles at 40'c.

I just realized the Corsair liquid coolers are sealed and need zero maintenance. They instantly became way more attractive to me. I might buy one for my i7. I wish they made a GPU cooling option. Then again the ever looming fear of a leak may not be worth it.

Like RAM and a decent video card? Inexpensive suggestions, please.

Corsair is awesome with supporting their liquid coolers, they will cover any damage a leak costs to the rest of your system. If you want to see some forum threads about these situations I can find a few- Overclock.net has a Corsair Rep that frequents the site. Leaks are rare, but I think everyone who has had a problem has always been satisfied with the outcome.

Yeah ram and videocard. If you live in the US, I have 4gb of DDR2 that I could send. For the videocard, what kind of power supply are you working with and your case isnt a low profile design is it? I think I have a 5570 1gb that probably doesnt use much more power than your 8300gs but would probably be atleast 3x faster.

I believe that, but the hassle and potential data loss they can't cover.

Failure is very rare.

And potential data loss is why I backup daily. It's probably more likely that your hard drive might crap out on you anyway.

Yeah, if the Corsair coolers weren't fully permanently sealed I wouldn't even dare. That was what turned me on to them.

Ugh, the C2D is back to idling at 50~'c, Stock coolers are total ****.

My i7-7200k idles at a steady 30 degrees, and rises to 35-40 max when running. And I'm an intel stock cooler. Of course my case has incredible ventilation.

This is kind of an obvious question but you put thermal paste, right?

I believe it's a 375w power supply, and it's a full-size tower. It's a Dell XPS 410 if that influences anything. And yes, I'm in the US.

Stock coolers are fine. They work well under all normal conditions. If your temps are high it probably is another problem, such as poor overall ventilation. You probably have it seated incorrectly, or ****ed up the application of thermal paste. Please tell me you DIDN'T remove the stock thermal paste and put on your own. Stuff like Artic Silver gets marginally lower temperatures but dries out over time and is harder to apply correctly. Best off leaving the stock material, which is a phase change substance that liquefies under heat and fills the gaps in contact. It's also longer life than most thermal pastes.

Intel's engineers know what they're doing. Unless you're very sensitive to noise (the stock cooler should be fine even under load, in my experience) or are doing heavy overclocking, you should not attempt to use anything other than the stock heatsink with the stock thermal material.

I put on my own paste on because this was, as I mentioned, made of spare parts I scrounged. I got the chip from a dead (Motherboard and PSU died,) Dell, with a cooler that is incompatible with general 775 motherboards. Which sucks because it's this gigantic heatsink with a fan that at 100% sounds like a jet turbine, but is normally quiet. Can't even use the fan because it's 5 pin and this motherboard is 4, ugh. In hindsight I probably should have gotten the motherboard too.
Either way, I bought a cheap heatsink off newegg. 16 dollars seems a small price to pay for a fully working C2D system. As a bonus I've heard of E6300s going as high as 2.5, that would be nice.

Wait what? A 5-pin fan? What the hell is that? There's only 3 or 4 pin fans that I'm aware of, and the latter is compatible with the former.

K, sounds like a good fit. I'll msg you in a day or two, the 5570 1gb is arriving in the mail, not in my possession yet.

Can I get you a blowjob or anything?

Uh? http://fanadaptors.ecrater.com/p/8485388/dell-5-pin-4-wire-fan-connector

Oh I see, the 5 pin is some stupid Dell proprietary crap. Adding a pin just because we can!

Adding a pin just to **** with anyone who re-uses parts. Also that fan connector is nice, but for 6 dollars more I could just buy a whole damn heatsink, which I did, I'm happy.
Not to mention the fact that the heatsink uses a different set of insertion holes then standard LGA 775, again because Dell is dicks.

Yeah, I wasn't really saying it was worth the money. It's stupid that something like that even has to exist.

That's not necessary.

Are you sure? Tibby's right over there.

god damnit i call next scrap video card D:

I'm pretty sure a 5570 is only on par with your 3850/3870. I dont think I have anything that would run on your 350w PSU at the moment.

Bit the bullet and ordered all of my stuff. No telling when the 680s will come in since I had to just jump on the chance to backorder them when Amazon let me.

There's a thread on HardOCP where people have been posting links to GTX 680's getting in stock. About the only thing HardOCP is good for, really.

I've been checking Newegg and Amazon every so often. About once a day I saw one pop up in stock on Newegg, and on Amazon about once or twice a day one would pop up as "temporarily out of stock" but still let you place an order. Decided today when I saw it pop up on Amazon again to go ahead and order. From what I've seen, once Amazon lets you order them, it's usually only a couple of days before they ship out, since I think basically what they're doing is letting you preorder their next allotment.

Nice.

Saw the non-reference, pre-overclocked Asus version of the cards pop up on Newegg today in stock, so I cancelled my Amazon order since it still had no ship date.

Extra glad I'm getting that beefy case now with two of these guys on the way...



The 580's with this same design run just fine in SLI with no real heat issues, so two of these almost back-to-back shouldn't be a problem considering the 680 runs cooler.

Taking up 3 slots they better damn well not be hot! Jesus christ. Screw that sucker tight into the case, I'd hate to see all that weight hanging off the mobo.

What in the world do you plan on running off these anyway? 3-monitor gaming or something ridiculous?

Not 3 monitors, just 1 huge one. 2560x1600.

One of them is already capable of 60fps in every game at that resolution... whatever.

Except in this one set of benchmarks, you can clearly see multiple games that aren't capable of 60 FPS average. Quite a few hover barely above 60 FPS, which means there are clearly going to be moments where they dip below that.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/nvidia-geforce-gtx-680-review

Not to mention games that come out in the future that may require more power. Not to mention the fact that an average of 60 FPS isn't really the ideal case. A game running 60 FPS average can still slow down during intense areas and get choppy. Minimum framerate really is a much better metric if you're trying to showcase true smoothness.

Either way, why does it bother you so much that someone else is buying a computer that, according to you at least, is "too powerful"? Maybe I'll go play the Mass Effect 3 ending over and over again on it and post about it too so your head explodes.

It's not your money dude, and I've been doing this for many, many years, so quite frankly, your opinion on it means squat to me.

Got the cooler on the C2D, pretty sweet for free. The monitor also owns (Dell 1908FP).
Motherboard refuses to OC though, poop.

Also, heeeyyy kinda getting a little too angry about video cards up there.

It is your money, I just find it funny when people throw it away. SLI is never a good idea. It's always a more cost effective method to just upgrade your video card more often. But hey, you keep doing what you're doing, its your money to blow as you like.