Hi all: I have a P4 2.66ghz machine that I bought off the shelf about a year ago. As of late the CPU temp seems to be very high and the fan kicking into high speed which sounds like a 747 in my house. It's the Intel stock heatsink and fan. I'm not comfortable changing out the heatsink myself so I'm looking into additional cooling for the case in hopes it will help the CPU temp. My current CPU temps when Idle range from 49-53C and my case temps range from 35-40C. Are these temps too high? When I turn "SmartFan" off in the bios and let the CPU fan and case fans run at full speed (747 jet engine..) the CPU idles around 37C and the case down around 30-35C, but it's just way too loud.. Any suggestions would be great, keeping in mind I'm not real comfortabe replacing the HSF.

I take it the 2.6 is a prescot !!! Temps of 49 to 53 are quiet normal for the prescot they all run hot as heck !!! Doubt if you will bring the temp down to much but a 37 with full speed on the fan is very good.. Have a look at the thermaltake range of aftermarkt coolers... www.thermaltake.com or the zalman range of coolers..www.zalman.com Eather way you cant go wrong with eather one of them....They are quiet large in size with large fans, but they are very very quiet.. But what you may also want to do is do some house work inside the case to improve tha ir flow...EG make sure your wiring is nice and tidy, not covering the cpu fan or hanging over the ram etc.. Try and rout the IDE cables in such a way they are tucked out of the way neatly etc. All of this helps with air flow inside the case.... If you ahve 2 drives and they are close together try and seperate them if you can etc.... Hope thats some help to you... IF IT AINT BROKE, DONT FIX IT A8N-SLI Deluxe AMD X64 3500+ Wnchst Corsair 2x512 DDR400 Dual Channel GV-NX6600128D PCIX Graphics Card Ggbyte GT Pro CPU Cooler Zalman VF700-CU VGA Cool

Solution to bring down CPU temperature 1. Remove your heatsink, lap it with 600 grit sand paper and then finish it with 800... 1200+ is optional for shiny surface 2. Remove your old thermal paste and add in new arctic silver 5.. 3. Wrap up all cables in the case to ensure that no cable is blocking the air flow... 4. If you don't have any case fan, add 1 intake fan below the hard drive and 1 exhaust fan below the power supply... 5. Buy more efficent coolers like thermaltake cl-p0024 or zalman cnps9500... 6. Vaccum your computer regularly (inside also especially fan areas... they tends to collect lots of dust) TMP-Man Asus P5P800-SE P4 506 2.66Ghz @ 4100Mhz 1.525v Thermaltake CLP0024 w/ 2000RPM FAN 1024MB DC Corsair DDR400 40GB 5400RPM/120GB 7200RPM HD 128MB Radoen 9500 mod 9700 @ 360/585