I'm new at this, so i need some help

golavaman

New Member
Hi, i'm building my first pc, well, the first one that's for preformance, and i'm having trouble figuring out how i'm going to do my cooling system. so far i have 5 80mm case fans, 2 aluminum heat spreaders for the memory, 1 standard processor fan heatsync for my amd athlon 64 processor. i have a video card with just a heatsync so i was thinking about getting an exhaust pci slot fan. my case has 1 fan slot in the back, 2 in the front, 1 on the side panel and 1 on the top which i removed since i got a power supply with a fan that sticks out the back but i can put it back. i was thinking about getting some heatsyncs for the chips on the motherboard and the memmory on the video card. any advice, which way should fans blow, etc etc?
 
I'm using the same cpu, AMD 3400+, but im getting warm temps on it, need a new heatsink, but sounds like you got plenty of cooling to get you started. You should make the fans on the front and side intake, and the ones on back exhaust.
 
Not sure about that. Your heatsink should primarily take care of the cpu, i think the heatsink fan blows on the cpu. So, if you have another one above it, it probably wouldnt hurt to be blwoing towards it.
 
i always make the side fan exhaust, so it removes the air directly around the cpu. works like a charm
 
If you're using the stock heatsink/fan, I'd have the rear and side fans as exhaust.

i have a video card with just a heatsync so i was thinking about getting an exhaust pci slot fan.
I doubt it's necessary.

i was thinking about getting some heatsyncs for the chips on the motherboard and the memmory on the video card.
Again, I don't think it's necessary, but if you want... Zalman's products are always nice.
 
Modoman said:
i always make the side fan exhaust, so it removes the air directly around the cpu. works like a charm
My computer had a case fan directly above the CPU as exhaust, and flipping it to intake actually lowered my temps about 2 degrees (C, mind you).
 
i wouldnt have thought that the heatsinks for the chips on the mobo were necessary, i take it you mean the northbridge and south bridge chips. Northbridge SHOULD already have one on there cause it gets ridiculouskly hot, thats where most things happen (aside from the CPU of course). Southbridge usually governs things like onboard graphics or PCI bus etc. Doesnt usually get too hot nless you are an extremeist in the land of overclocking. Non of the other chips will get hot during normal use, memory chips on the graphics on ly start to get a little warm during heavy gaming so once agan prob not necessary.

Stick with all the fans you got and you should be pretty sweet. The heat spreaders for the RAM is a good iea though, i like that, i might get some.
 
Not always,.. my friend has a zalman cpu cooler,.. and its making really, really much noise
Actually, I was referring to Zalman's chipset and memory heatsinks. But still... weird. I've had two Zalman processor coolers and two video card coolers without any problems. At full blast, they are the quietest fans in my system.
 
should i have the fan on top of the processor blow onto the processor, or away from it b
Unless you're getting the heatsink and fan separately then you dont have to worry about this. Regardless 99% of HSF assemblies have the fan blowing towards the CPU
 
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