cooling 101?

[BerniniCaCO3]

Hi!

So, I just bought a 2nd hand desktop. My Dell laptop has impressive specs for a laptop, but then it overheats... and then it's not so impressive.

Like a car with an undersized radiator, quite fine cruising on the highway, fine in city traffic, fine even going up a steep hill. But send it up a mountain, a few miles of steep slope, and then it overheats and is no longer fine.

Cooling pad didn't cut it, I don't really need a laptop's portability, and so it's time to get a desktop.




End of backstory.
At the end is the system I ended up buying.
Since cooling is what has scared me away from the laptop world, I'm naturally worried about it in desktops, though of course they're more open and naturally better at it.

I do gaming and 3d modeling. I've seen some CPU water cooling systems for $200/ $100 2nd hand that get good reviews. If I'm not overclocking, do I care? Or is it still beneficial? If so, $100 isn't a terribly expensive upgrade, for a very basic water cooling system-- or maybe I can assemble something myself, buy the radiators and fans, and then take a pond pump and some fish tank tubing

I was also wondering-- is it worth investing in independent fans for memory? For a hard drive? For a SSD if I get one (do they also get hot?)? Or even water cool the video card in addition to the CPU?
The CPU seems to be the popular concern, but I don't know if that means that it really is the sole concern.

Currently there are just 120mm case fans to push/pull the air through the case, and then one dedicated CPU fan.


thanks for the advice!
-Bernard








Intel Core i7-920
ZALMAN CNPS9700 CPU Cooler
F3G.SKILL 6GB (3 x 2GB)-10666CL7T-6GBPK
ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 LGA 1366
Asus Nvidia 9800GTX+ 512MB
Thermaltake case & power supply

 

[Aastii]

You can check your current temperatures when the system is idle/heavy load, and anywhere in between with temperature monitoring software, such as HWmonitor:

ftp://ftp.cpuid.com/hwmonitor/hwmonitor_1.16-setup.exe

If your temperatures look alright, and you aren't going to be overclocking, you don't have anything to worry about, just clean out the dust every few months, and maybe 2 or 3 times a year reapply thermal paste.

To do that, you take off the heatsink from your CPU, with a lint free cloth or coffee filters wipe off the old thermal paste, then use a clean lint free cloth/coffee filter with 90+% isopropyl (rubbing alcohol) to clean out the old stuff properly, and then reapply new stuff. Don't be using cheap stuff though, it will work, but you won't get temperatures as good as if you use something like Arctic Silver 5 (AS5) or shin etsu. You want to put a small blob on there, not a lot, about the size of a grain of rice, then just put the heatsink back on, making sure it is in properly.

You don't need heatsinks for your memory, yours come with heatspreaders anyway.