Thermalright SP-97...heat pipes good (Score 2, Informative)

Thanks for posting that...I'm afraid he was /.'d way before I got to the site. I'm going to agree that the Thermalright SP-97 is the best air cooled heatsink out right now...for overclocking or silent pc operation. If you want to go extreme overclocking, toss some ridiculously loud/high CFM fan on there...for silent PC run a slower RPM, quieter fan. Either way this heatsink will do its job. I just upgraded from an XP 2800+ that I bought last December to an XP 2500+ Barton...I took the Barton and changed the FSB from 333mhz to 400mhz...resulting in a 3200+ Barton (very common thing right now). With the retail heatsink/fan combo the diode (core CPU) temperature would max at around 60 c. It was rock solid (24 hours of distributed.net running in the background with BF1942 w/ 63 AI players and myself with 1600x1200 resolution to generate as much video card heat as possible...even with my guy just sitting at the spawn), but the 60 c temperature made me nervous. I ordered one of the new Thermalright SP-97 and tossed it on there with the Tornado 92mm high RPM fans...the max temperature (even in a warm room) dropped to 44 c. Unfortunately the sound of that fan was just too much for me. I pulled it off and put my old 80mm fan (still a really good fan...65 CFM or so as opposed to the 119 CFM of the Tornado) on instead. It still maxes out to 44 c. I've been meaning to push the FSB higher, to see exactly how far I can go, but haven't gotten around to it yet. The Thermalright SP-97 is the best heatsink I've ever used (keep in mind that you have the have a P4 CPU mount style motherboard as it doesn't have the CPU socket clips...and if it did you probably wouldn't want to use them, as this is a pretty hefty unit).