Robin said:
Asus's advice for their P5E3 Deluxe board is, for active cooling, to
use a heat sink with radial fins, which the standard Intel retail
coreduo has. The Arctic cooler I bought has parallel fins, so I
thought it best not to use it. I don't over clock.
There is more to cooling than just the CPU cooler. Sometimes,
a radial cooler may "spill" cooling air, onto MOSFET
coolers or chipset cooling devices. For example, if a
person was using a water block for their CPU, then the
surrounding stuff gets "nothing" for cooling air. So
you also have to consider whether there is enough airflow
through the computer case, to help keep some of the
lesser important stuff cool.
You don't have to get paranoid about this, but just use
a little common sense when planning system cooling.
My current system uses a Zalman CNPS7000, with a
little bit of adjacent spillage, and has one large
cooling fan in the back (120x120x38) to keep
everything else cool. Using your hardware monitor
software program, to display temps, as well as
doing a "touch test" with your finger, can help
guide you on cooling. For example, probably
soon after installation, I may have used my finger
tip, to check the MOSFETs on my motherboard that
don't have any heatsinks on them. If you burn yourself,
then that is too hot (>65C).
A stress testing program like Prime95 (or some of the
other programs specifically intended to heat up the
CPU), can be used to establish demanding cooling
conditions. What programs like that do, is simulate
how hard the computer will work, when doing real work,
and help you to determine whether you did a good job
of cooling the computer.
Paul
