Hello, I've got a Gateway machine. It's a Pentium III 600. I also have 384MB RAM and an Anihilator 2 GTS video card. I don't think I'm having any heat problems but I'd like to get some more fans/heat sinks/whatever to cool it down a bit and maybe get some better performance. Now I've done a lot of stuff with this machine and I've messed with computers a lot but I've never really done anything with fans or any of that so I'm sort of clueless here. I wouldn't know what to buy or which ones would work in my machine, or if it even matters. Just looking for some general advise. I saw these fans that attach to your hard drive at CompUSA that looked like it just took up another 5.25" drive space which I have. Are these a good start? I would like to get some good air flow through the box and maybe a bigger heat sink on the processor. Help me out guys! Does the type of motherboard make a difference? If you need any more info about my machine setup just let me know. Thanks!

There, all registered

Well fans and heatsinks will do little more then prolong the life of your computer by a very small amount... Unless your a heavy smoker or live around a lot of dust, in which case the fan will do little more then blow all sorts of shit into your computer. At this point you would probably want a filter.

Tom's Hardwarehas some decent fan guides. And SLN does too if my memory serves me. The hard drive fans really are only good if you have a hot hard drive. (duh) Stay away from the ISA/PCI slot fans, as they are worthless, and get a fan for the front and rear one pulling in cold air the other pushing out hot. As far as the processor goes i would have to know the heatsink fan you already have on it.

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Tyler Ritchie
Project Coordinator
Silicon Insight
tyler@siliconinsight.com

Concerning those 5.25 drive bay cooling fans. I bought two of them and basically had to rig them up in my last case and totally toss them for my new case. They come with rails for you to mount your harddrive on, but the holes in my first case allowed me to bolt the fan part of it in, but the drive part just sat loose in my case because I couldn't bolt in in due to lack of holes to do so. My new case, a Antec SX1030, has drive rails and made it impossible. I had another machine that had two open 5.25 slots and put both of those fans in there just for extra cooling. Basically, if it was a one piece solution (ie drive rails and fan were one piece) instead of a two piece solution it would be nice. The particular brand I got was from StarTech, but there are a lot out there under different names that are the same design.

What type of case do you have? Is it the type where you can remove the side pannels? I found it usefull to mount two case fans to the side of that. Just put the fan up to side of the case trace around the inside of the fan and take a scroll saw to cut it out. It significantly increases air flow in your case, plus it cools down all of your cards, especially your video card if you have one that runs really hot like mine. Its also a good idea to actually cut the cover away from the back of your powersupply, I've found that that decreases air flow and creates extra noise.

get a few delta black lable fans to replace you heatsink and case fans.

http://www.hardocp.com/reviews/cool...101/index5.html

http://anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1430&p=2

Here's two excellent sources of info on CPU Heatsink/Fan combinations.

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