I finally got around to buying a better heatsink for my computer – a Thermaltake SonicTower. It’s meant to be fanless, although there is an optional fan that you can install onto it as well.
I picked this up at good old Canada Computers and, for some reason, didn’t get the optional fan. In looking for a simple 12cm fan here in Burlington, I was met with either ignorance and people who wanted to sell me a whole different CPU cooler, or the fact that they weren’t sold at the stores I checked. As I said, I should have just picked one up at Canada Computers.
I decided to just install it without the fan. It was a little tricky, but not altogether difficult, to install the sink onto the motherboard (which I had to remove from the computer case). The problem came when it was time to reconnect all the cables and power it back on again. It wouldn’t turn on properly. At one point, the motherboard got power, but nothing would actually happen.
It was only the next day, when I checked the manual online from work, that I discovered the reason. One of the power connections had not been hooked up – and it wasn’t for a lack of my looking for it. What was happening, after I knew exactly where it was located, was that it was hiding directly underneath one of the heat sink “towers”, so I hadn’t been able to seen it when scanning the motherboard.
Once I knew where it was, I had another tricky moment. I had to unscrew the power supply and push it back into the case so that I had a bit of room in which to actually attach the 12V lead to the motherboard. I almost thought I might have to remove the sink altogether but, luckily, that wasn’t the case.
My CPU is now running about 10-15 degrees centrigrade cooler than it had been before, and there is no fan so it’s quieter too. I had to change my BIOS so that it would boot past the fact that there was no fan (normally, a serious problem) but everything is working now. I’ll probably still hook up a fan the next time I get to Canada Computers, but there’s no rush.
Now, if only I could make my server more quiet…