Stuffed up my Arctic Silver application

[TresLunas]

After reading so many reviews saying to only put a very thin layer of Arctic Silver 3 between my heatsink and CPU, I ended up putting on a layer too thin. My non-overclocked P4 2.0A was 67°C under load! I fixed it up a bit now, it's reading 56°C at the moment (overclocked to 2.26GHz). Still seems a bit high, but then I'm using a Zalman heatsink, so it's supposed to be quiet, not cool.

At least my computer isn't as loud anymore. The only thing making noise now is the Northbridge fan, and it's driving me nuts!

 

[Abhoth]

Zalman's are cool, looking... ;-) But for the high speed/power and if you're going to OC, not sure they're the best choice!
And yes, dislike the fan thing on the Northbridge, slap a big heatsink on it. But around here we'd appreciate more in the spec department if you want suggestions..... Does that Zalman fan have the 3 different speeds? What you running it at?

 

[TresLunas]

Actually, my main aim is to have a quiet computer, and overclock it as much as from there, and if a 10% overclock is the best I can do, then so be it. Anyway, my system specs are:

Pentium 4 2.0A (very modest overclock at the moment to 2.26GHz)
Gigabyte GA-8IEX motherboard
512MB PC2700 Kingston RAM (but only running at about 300MHz)
80GB Seagate hard drive
Leadtek GF4 Ti4200 video card (fan doesn't make too much noise)
Antec 380W TruePower power supply (pretty quiet)
DVD drive
CD-RW drive

and the Zalman CNPS6500B-Cu HSF (or FHS - flower heatsink as they call it).

The supplied fan with the heatsink has variable speeds between about 1500 and 2500 rpm. Don't know how many cfm it would push, but it wouldn't be much. At the moment it's on maximum setting. I'll replace the Northbridge FHS with a big heatsink, and then lower the Zalman's fan speed. After I do that, the loudest component in the computer will be the video card, which I can live with.

 

[mrman3k]

I actually think the loudest component in your system will be the hard drives.

 

[TresLunas]

Actually the hard drive is pretty damn quiet. The CD drives are loud (obviously), but I can barely hear the Seagate when it is reading/writing, let alone when it's idle.

I think some dust has got into the Northbridge fan and is slowing it down. It's way too loud - gonna see if I can clean it somehow.