Want to cool my system need advice!

[Citadel535]

Greetings everyone,

I have an AMD Athlon 1200MHz running on an ASUS A7V133 in an Antec SX1030B case. I have two fans in the back of the case, one power supply fan, and the airflow is decent with cables cleared. I ordered two more fans for the front of the case to pull air in. Right now my Athlon is running at 54C and the motherboard is at 31C and I am not sure what to do to make it cooler. I am using the HSF that came with the AMD processor and the thermal tape on the bottom. I have heard to use Arctic Silver and I am looking at a copper spacer but not sure what that does? Any other suggestions?

 

[overdog]

It may help, for the time being, to arrange your case fans so that you have 1 front intake fan, and 1 rear exhaust fan. I have the SX830 case, and I tried every possible configuration: 2 front intake, 2 rear exhaust, and 1 and 1.

I found that placing my front fan in the bottom-most clip in the front, and placing my rear fan in the lower clip of the two in the back provides the best case and cpu temperatures for me.

Since you are not overclocking, the retail Athlon HSF should be fine, but if you want to use Arctic Silver, there are instructions here.

 

[MrThompson]

Overdog's comments plus a bit on shims. Some may not like this but shims are training wheels so you don't crunch the core when installing a HSF. They do not help cooling. Joe at Overclockers has a write up on how they cause slightly higher temps. If you want to try a shim, get a non-conductive phenolic resin one with an adhesive back. Folks have fried their chip because they dropped a malleable copper shim and damaged it. The tolerances being tight and the damage not visible, upon installation it kept the HS from making good contact with the CPU die.