Yup! I totally agree. Putting a shim on gave my HSF better tension and made it completely level... So why the SHIM ITSELF didn't decrease my temperatures, it was a cog in the wheel of my cooling system
. The decrease was in C, and was monitored by Motherboard Monitor 5. If you don't use it, check it out, once you set it up correctly, it is an excellent tool. Here's a link for you guys:
http://mbm.livewiredev.com/
How many fans do you guys have in your box?? I've done a few minor adjustments with inexpensive equipment to make my system run really cold. Here's the few things I've done.
1) I have 2 3 fan hard drive coolers. I have four 5.25 drive bays. I took the bottom where the is no drive to restrict airflow, and put one in their, sucking cool air in. I took one of the hd coolers apart and put the fans in backwards so they blow out, and put that in the top 5.25 slot, so it blows warm air from the top of my system out.
2) Cleaned up the top blow hole by cuttting it out and put an 80mm enermax thermal control fan on it, but put the sensor on the heatsink so it always runs at 3100 rpms blowinr air up and out of my system.
3) Cleaned up the bottom blow hole by cutting it out and put the same 80mm enermax fan on it with sensor also on cpu heatsink.
4) Took 3, yes 3 slot fans. Took my soundblaster card and put it in bottom slot, put a slot fan above it, blowing any warm air out that rises off the back of the card.
4b) Took my second slot fan and put it in the AMR slot above the AGP slot because I don't have an AMR modem. This takes hot air rising from the Geforce3 TI500 and blows it out the back.
4c) Took apart the slot fan so that it sucks in air, rather than blow it out, and turned it upside down (real easy, for one, you can pull them right apart with your bare hands to reseat the fan, and to turn it upside down, the bracket is reversable, so it takes about 2 mins to do) and put this under my video card, so the cool air sucks in and blows on the card. It is a good 6 inches away from the bottom slot fan, so while it may be getting a little hot air feedback from that, that is outweighed by the cooler air it is getting from the room, rather than in the case...
5) Got a thermaltake volcano7, but took the heat sensor off of it, so it aways runs at 5500rpms. Of course, with a SHIM
hehe. And Arctic Silver II, III wasn't out yet when I did it, and I'm not going to order III until I run out of the II.
6) Took my original chipset heatsink off, took off the crappy thermal tape, cleaned the chipset with nail polish remover, cleaned the heatsink as well, and then sanded it down with a metal finishing pad, put arctic silver on the chipset and the superglued the edges of the heatsink down. Then I took an old 60x60x20 heatsink fan and superglued that to the heatsink, and it keeps my chipset really cold. I can overclock way higher now (about 14% higher now) just because of the chipset cooling.
7) Got thermaltakes ACTIVE memory cooling kit (a 40x40x20mm fan on your memory) Takes about 5 mins to install. And keeps your memory very cool!
Now my system runs really cold between 40-44 degrees, and that is overclocked to 1725 with 150fsb...
Next project is to put two of the 80mm fans in the left side, 1 blowing down by the pci slots, and one blowing up high by the cpu. I'll have to put one more fan up high to keep the air movement in and out relatively the same. And, next week, I'm adding rounded cables, they should help with better air flow...
Well, thats my neverending battle
It seems I can always find a pet project to do... Also, you need a really good Power Supply to to this, personally mine is 425W with a 230TCO.
Getting back to the original idea of the post, Motherboard Monitor 5 will also monitor your voltages to tell you if your PSU isn't quite up to the task!
Thanks for all the good thoughts on my first post here!
Be cool! :grinthumb
Kris!