Tight fit!
Yesterday I wrote about a chipset heatsink I bought for an upcoming 975X motherboard. Well that motherboard arrived today (38 quid off eBay, such a bargain) so I got on with installing the heatsink.
The whole thing was easy enough but if your motherboard uses clips rather than studs to hold down the chipset cooler then the HR-05 heatsink will probably cause problems with your CPU cooler (as you can see in the third picture). Add a fan to this cooler (why would you?) and then you have further issues. As to why they had to set the clasp do that the cooler will be at this odd angle is beyond me.
For me it wasn't a problem because I'm going to use watercooling but if you are considering purchasing the HR-05 then I would suggest two things:-
- Try to use this only when you have studs to hold down the heatsink
- Make sure your CPU heatsink fits with this thing on - if you have one which uses a 120mm fan on the same plane as the motherboard, it most probably won't.
Chipset heatsink
I recently purchased an used motherboard off eBay which came with a fan to cool the chipset. This is quite frankly rubbish as it will eventually fan and before it does so, it will make a load of noise and shift a lot of dust. So I purchased this rather nifty heatsink for the 975 chipset. It's made by Thermalright and is aluminium. I
Check out the fins!
Hopefully installation should be easy enough - though I fear for one of my passively cooled video cards which has a massive heatsink on the back. More pictures will follow upon installation!
New power supply unit
I recently built a machine to replace my current workstation with components I had lying around. The only thing I needed to purchase was a new motherboard as the two units I had in the lab were less than reliable. The machine itself isn't cutting edge but it is fast enough, being comprised of the following items:
Intel QX6700 quad core processor (underclocked to 2.0GHz)
4GB PC6400 Corsair DDR2 RAM
1 15,000 RPM Maxtor Atlas 15KIII 36GB hard drive (for operating system and applications)
1 10,000 RPM Seagate Cheetah 10.7 36GB hard drive (for swap)
256MB MSI Geforce 8600 GT passively cooled
The whole thing is watercooled using an old but trusty Zalman Reserator cooling system. The power supply I had knocking about was an 850W Hiper Power unit which looks stunning and kept the machine stable. However it had two fans and produced quite a noise so I decided to replace it. My first choice for PSUs is Seasonic however the store down the road didn't have them so I went for this Corsair TX650 (650W) unit which is actually made by Seasonic. It's had good reviews and is quiet so I'm going to nip home and install it. I can't wait 
The silent workhorse