I cleaned and oiled the NF7-S northbridge fan, and my CPU temps are now lower

[idea]

I thought you guys would find this interesting. My faulty northbridge fan was pissing me off, and as long as I was inside the case messing with my video card today I thought I'd take it out and clean it up a bit. A few sprays of canned air, and two drops of sewing machine oil, and I screwed it back in. My CPU under full load is now 46C! Before it would idle as high as 50-52C! I have no idea what I did, but I'm glad I did it.

 

[Spike]

hmmm, I took mine out and put a Zalman passive cooler in place and now my idle temps are 10c wamer (46 now) than before...

-spike

 

[Tiamat]

Spike, I got a temp increase as well with the zalman - about 5C. But the temp increase is normal as the zalman is a passive cooler dumping its heat near the cpu.

Idea: Thats a good point. One of the bigger culprits was probably the dust buildup. Dust = insulator, so it traps heat from leaving the system. I never really though about doing the sewing machine oil trick as I went directly to the Zalman NB sink as well.