A T-Bird was my reintroduction to AMD cpu's (I'd not seen much from the k5/K6 and had some Pentiums between my last AMD 486 and the first of my two T-Birds). But I've avoided the stock hsf's for my AMD processors for the most part. I've tried a couple of the Volcano hsf's. I found them no better, and maybe even worse, than what the Boxed CPU comes equipped with (right now, I have a low-noise hsf on an XP 1700 in a Biostar MB that idles at 41-43 degrees Celcius; I haven't pushed it to see what it does under stress. This particular heat sink was on sale at Newegg for half off the MSRP - it's an XDream II, and hasn't been rated at the better HSF testing web site, FrostyTech, but I didn't expect it to be anything special).
I live where winter lasts about one month, occasionally up to six weeks, and during a five month long summer, the high 90's are common, and the 100's are frequent visitors (south Texas). With two sub- 1 GHz Pentiums, and one T-Bird in a room with a 6000 BTU window AC unit two years ago, I could easily have kept all three on at the same time in summer. Two T-Birds by themselves were enough to overmatch that heat total. Two Palominos and one Barton "seem" to be throwing off roughly the same total heat production, but it's a bit hard to be sure, since there has been growth in here for other heat sources as well (another printer, a printer server device, etc.)