System Cooling, Socket 939

[Sentient]

Hey,

About 7 months ago I put together a personal system equipped with the MSI K8N NEO4 Platinum SLI board (nForce4), 1GB DDR400 ram, 1.080 Tb of HD space (Irrelevant to my question, but I had to list it ), and a FX-55 processor coupled with the standard AMD heatsink that came with the processor.

I've been using this PC pretty consistantly for the full 7 months now, frequently to its limits, as I do a lot of visual art, graphic design, sound engineering, and music production. In some instances I have 3-4 Adobe applications open along with Macromedia Flash / Dreamweaver, 3D Studio Max, and I'm always accessing stock photography that can range anywhere from 5-40MB per compressed image.

While for the most part I've been impressed with this system - I've come to the conclusion it's not good enough, and that it's absolutely vital I drain every last penny I own to make it better (I'm ridiculously impatient and I have severe impulse control problems). Specifically, I am looking into cooling options to replace my current setup as my temperatures are running a bit hot and I want to OC.

Specifically, I'm looking at this:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications...details.asp?EdpNo=1645513&Sku=Z20-1105

My questions are:

1. Will system performance and stability degrade at all by me breaking the contact between the CPU and heatsink to install the above water cooling system? I think I remember reading a while ago that it's generally a bad idea to do so. Other people I'm talking to on IRC at the moment are saying its fine.

2. What should I clean the CPU with? (I was originally going to use a steel bristle SOS pad and dish-washing detergant, but I'm afraid that might be a tad too harsh.)

3. Being new to system cooling, are there any other cooling systems that I should know about within the price range of $200-$350 (My life savings), that are better than the Zalman Reserator1? I've heard of those crazy phase change systems - are there any respected ones within that price range?

Thanks for any help.

 

[Sentient]

Bump.

 

[RHITee05]

Unless you do a really terrible job of installing the new cooler, your system stability and temps should stay the same or get better.

When you take off the stock HS, the trick is to clean the CPU off well to get rid of all the old thermal compound. A little rubbing alcohol (the less watered-down the better) and a coffee filter work well. Coffee filters are nice because they're lint-free (unlike, say, a paper towel). You want to get the CPU surface as clean and dust-free as you possibly can to get good thermal contact. It doesn't take too much force or effort, though. Anything abrasive is a bad idea because that will make the CPU surface rougher and ruin your thermal contact.

The new cooler will come with thermal paste. If you're really serious you can get some high-end paste, like Arctic Silver 5, but the stuff they provide is decent and AS5 might only save you a couple of degrees or so. The trick, though, is to only use a tiny bit of it. Even if you don't get AS5, visit www.arcticsilver.com and look at their instructions. The paste is supposed to fill in the pits and such in the metal surfaces, but it takes only a very small amount to do that. Anything more will just insulate the cooler and reduce your thermal performance. Their instructions have a few good pics to show you how it's supposed to work, and they're pretty much applicable to any similar paste.