cooling a 1700+ in a low profile case?

[Walleye]

i'm building a system for my grandfather, he wont be running it on the net, but i want to give it some power and stability, so what i've selected so far:

A7n266-VM mobo
Athlon XP 1700+ TbredB core (hopefully)
crucial 256 pc2100 DDR RAM

and a cd/rw, and a hard drive, and a recycled floppy drive...

so what would you guys suggest i get as a CPU fan to cool this? this case doesnt exactly have any case fans... i want to give him a desktop, not a tower...ideally. but if a tower is necessary, then oh well. i'm trying to build this as cheaply as possible, while giving him a quality system. he does a lot of work on the computer (which is amazing for a 90 year old...) he's currently running on a K6-500 with a dying hard drive...

this is the best microATX case i could find. if necessary, i will underclock the CPU for stability and cooling reasons, but i wont be overclocking it by any means. i certainly dont want to stress the power supply...


another thing. this computer will never ever see the net past the download of critical updates for stability's purpose... past that, i'm going to be disabling every single service except plug and play, and printing services,... for stabilitys sake. so i can get rid of all networking services... i doubt this computer will EVER run full load... hell, it'll never use sound unless i give him a set of speakers....

 

[Chumpman]

Why are you so paranoid regarding the stability of the computer? I run a 2500+ barton with just a (lameass) Volcano 9 heatsink. No case fans or anything, and it runs fine (albeit a bit warm).

 

[wetcat007]

Best Microcase? What about those nice shuttle ones, those seem to work great according to reviews anyways.

 

[Cheetah8799]

I just built my gaming system in that exact same case and motherboard. I used an Alpha PAL8045 mounted to the motherboard, then drilled a 80mm hole directly over it and mounted an 80mm fan to the case. This left about 1/4" between the fan and the cpu. I tried other HSF combos without the case hole, and the temps were super high, in the 55C to 60C range at 100% load. The hole helped a lot, but there was still a gap between the fan and the hole. That's why I mounted the fan directly to the top of the case. With just the hole I was getting temps around 53C at load with my CoolerMaster super-quiet HSF. The hsf was only rated up to a 2200+, so I was pushing it a little bit... The Alpha dropped the temps about 5C.

The power supply gives off a lot of heat, and I am trying to think of ways to get it to blow out the hot air better. The fan in the psu is quite crappy. It doesn't to much at all, as I'm sure you have already noticed.

Oh, I also am having issues with the ambient temperature around the hard drive area. I decided to remove the floppy drive and mount an 80mm fan blowing down into the hard drive area. It helped a lot with the case off, but now that the case is back on it is not really doing much except make noise... It still lowers the motherboard temp a little, but not much. I think adding an exhaust fan near the hard drive would help more. Maybe another hole in the case where the floppy is supposed to be. Or maybe a smaller 40mm hole with an old socket7 fan would do the trick.

I am running an XP2200, you won't need to underclock your 1700. Just get some fresh air in there and you should be fine. Mine is cool, about 46C idle, and very quiet also.