Here's my little story.

I made a small upgrade and in the process... I got to kill two birds with one stone.

I decided to change the stock CPU and GPU fans. I was getting really annoyed with the noise coming out of my pc and i had some concerns with GPU heat after running the artifact scan from ATITOOL.

After checking out many reviews about different products, i finally chose:

Zalman CNPS9500 LED for the CPU and VF900-Cu for the GPU. The whole installation took me about an hour and a half. I was carefull and took my time.

I used a special 3M cleaning solution to get all the gunk off the CPU and GPU. The GPU (X800XT) was overflowing with compound. Geez... way to go gonzo on the compound ATI. After it was all nice and clean, i used Arctic Silver 5 before putting the fans. OMG!!! These things are so amazingly quiet! I can finally hear my hard drives!!! I was really blown away at the results. see for yourself:

Idle CPU temp Stock = 41

Idle CPU temp Zalman = 29 Low speed

Idle GPU core temp Stock = 41

Max GPU core temp Stock = 82 after 2 minutes of ATITOOL artifact scan.

Idle GPU core temp Zalman = 32 Low speed

Max GPU core temp Zalman = 51 after 2 minutes of ATITOOL artifact scan. Still at low speed!!!

For those of you who care about their computers health, this is a worthwile upgrade.

BTW... Never forget to dust out the inside of your pc. It really accumulates fast.

very nice to hear. thats exactly why everyone should get away from stick cooling.

Stock cooling does well, but there are better ones indeed.

I must say that AMD cooler are relative silent and keep it cool enough.

Personally I don’t like the fans from iNTEL, for example the ones that come with Celeron and 5xx/6xx/8xx/9xx series CPUs.

GPU stock cooling is a pain in the a**, as well fans on other chipsets. I always prefer to change those ones for a fan-less system.

the heatsink that came with my opteron looked pretty amazing but my ninja is just 100x bigger. i couldnt stand my stock gpu cooling, 70C+ is just not right, now i never get above 60

LMAO... how ironic.

I was just sitting here thinking if I should make a post about my new upgrades. I changed my stock Intel CPU cooler and my nVidia 6600 GT's stock cooler with the exact same replacements (Zalman CNPS9500 & Zalman VF900-Cu).

Go figure...

Well anyways, it dropped 15C on my CPU and 12C on my video card, not to mention that they're both near silent now.

The early bird gets the worm!

I only wish that the CNPS9500 came with an option to use the Intel 4 pin connector.