Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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Ever since I built my new Silverstone pc, I’ve been struggling with a really bad problem. My Pentium D 820 is HOT, and I mean HOT. The poor Intel Heatsink is noisy and constantly revving from idle to 2000–3000 RPMs. Since it has a small itty bitty fan on it, this can get quite loud and annoying.
Over the past few months I have tried 4 different cpu heatsinks. Each was a disaster. Some were too loud (louder than the stock Intel) and others were ineffective allowing my CPU to overhead and the motherboard to shut down the machine.
The problem I have is that my case is rather small and will not allow for some of the monster heatsinks out there that operate at very low dBA (under 20 dBA). A few months ago I was researching a new Power Supply as my brand new el cheapo started clanking, and came upon a new CPU Heatsink from Coolermaster, the Hyper L3. This is a “low profile” heatsink meaning it’s big, but not huge. Also many heatsinks out there require you to even remove your motherboard and mount a supporting plate underneath. Since the Intel Pentium D uses the LGA775 mount (a clip in) this is an extra pain. So the good news was that this new Coolermaster used the existing LGA775 clip system (no motherboard removal) and was short enough to fit in my case. On top of that it uses the Intel 4 PIN power connector allowing the motherboard to control the RPMs.
Anyway, this new heatsink is the bomb. It’s so quiet I can barely hear it. The only other fan in my PC is the one in the Power Supply, and that’s ultra quiet running at 16 dBAs. The Coolermaster Hyper L3 runs at 18 dBA making my PC really silent. Just for fun I ran maxcpu to stress both processors and while the fan kicked in, it’s much larger than the Intel fan (80mm fan vs 60mm) so it produces much less noise and it kept the temp under 70 degrees C. I bet I could get a fanless CPU but the one I got pushes hot air off my cpu fan so that helps cool the PC, which is a good thing for me.
Here are my updated specs: