You pretty much have to rely on reviews to evaluate coolers. The fans you evaluate by noise(db), speed(rpm), flow(cfm) and pressure (mm or inches of hg). That would be 40 celsius not fahrenheit.

Well, the damage is minimized. If it ever does shut down, I'd look into replacements (for the heat sink) quick.

Make sure the cooler matches your socket; something that is made for intel may not be compatible with an AMD processor (and often it isn't).

Here's a temperature/noise level comparison for the major coolers:

http://www.frostytech.com/articlevie...id=1922&page=4

More reading reveals that the proc will put out something like 65 watts of heat. So how many CFMs does it take to dissipate 65 watts, I wonder. It depends on fin area, I'm sure, and I have seen charts and graphs showing the dT resulting from such and such an air velocity but that was decades ago.

I know 40 means C. I did say Texas didn't I? It will prolly spend several weeks with highs around 40 this summer. It did last year and the year before. And no, I don't have A/C due to my efforts to save the planet.

That table is great. Now I just need to print it out and take it with me to the store. And no, I am not planning to order via Newegg becausse I expect to receive my stuff today and I don't wanna wait three more days to fire (he-he) the thing up.

rdx

If it is really 104 F where the computer will be sitting, you are going to need as much air flow as you can get. At a minimum I would have a 120mm pulling fresh air in at the bottom of the case and another at the top of the case exhausting hot air. I would keep a very close eye on my cpu, hd, and motherboard temperatures. Most electronics are not designed to run in temperatures that high.

Okay, I got the stuff today and put the system together. Right now the CPU is running at 37C (98.6F) just like me. What is really outrageous is that it booted right up, despite a new mobo, cpu, ram, and vga. I haven't been able to get the on-board LAN to work yet and the Linux driver source code won't compile like the instructions say. But basically my new system has picked up where the old one left off.

I will get back here with what I learn about the VIA Rhine LAN, the on-board LAN. For now, all I can say is, GOOD GRIEF the Heatsink is huge!! And I can play with the flash drive, another new toy. L8r.

rdx

Which heat sink did you wind up with?

Edit:

Here is a link to a picture of the one I was talking about: http://nuke1227.myweb.hinet.net/si-128.htm

The heatsink I got looks like the Tower 120 on that page. It is a little different but lots of thin fins held in place by 6 copper bars. It's pretty quiet, I can't hear it over the pwr supply.

It appears (reading the VIAarena site) that I need to upgrade my kernel from 2.2.x to 2.4.x to remedy the driver problem. That was the plan anyway, so now I just have to save off everything I might loose in upgrading and start loading the latest version. That will take some time, finding a few hundred gigs of vacant disk. But it needs doing. (Gulp)

You might want to consider just jumping to the 2.6 kernel.

Well, I might but I thought it was still experimental. Can you tell me what reasons tilt toward going with 2.6? Are there risks not likely with 2.4? Or am I worrying for nothing?

the 2.6 kernel is not experimental, it supports new hardware better, epecially usb drives

I think that the vast majority of distro are now using the 2.6 kernel. Fedora, Suse, Redhat, Ubuntu, ........

SATA support. I think 2.4 barely supports SATA (if at all); if you choose 2.4 and at some stage you decide to start using SATA, you would again have to compile a newer kernel.