Cooling!

Posted Wednesday, May 24th 2006

After some carefull consideration, I decided to get some extra cooling for my computer. I installed an 8cm silent case fan at the back, and I picked up the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro for my CPU. And so far, I’m quite happy with it. On idle temperature, it’s barely audible, and when under full load, it’s still immensely quieter than the stock PIV cooling system, which sounded like a jet taking off.

Temperatures have dropped quite a bit too. Idle temp has dropped about 10 degrees, and under load, the temp is lower than what it used to be on idle with the stock cooling. I’m expecting these numbers to get even better, as the thermal paste settles. Usually, the temp should drop by another 2 degrees or so.

Installing it was easy enough, as it uses the standard PIV mounting points, with no backplate. However, the BIOS didn’t seem to like the new cooler at first, and it had to be flashed in order to boot. The machine would not boot or post, but thankfully, that was solved, although it did give me quite a scare.

Also, a couple of quick links: Cool. It’s starting! || Scary, but still very cool!