Please help a newbie

[dcarrera]

Hello,
I need help choosing a CPU fan. After several months of research I have learned what I need to buy for almost every component of a computer. However, the fan still continues to elude me.

I've read all the articles in this website and I am still very unsure.

These are my considerations:

1) First of all, I want to try only moderate overclocking. I will start with a Duron, and some day I will get an Athlon XP.

2) Secondly, I really want a farily quiet fan. I want this computer on 24/7 and I want to be able to sleep confortably with it in my room.

My questions:
1) Someone suggested the Dynatron (the one with a copper heatshink). He said it was just what I needed, then again, he was trying to sell it to me. Is this a good option?

2) Should I get a thermal compound or a shim? What are the pros/cons? This man suggested the shim, but I noticed that it was more expensive than the compound.

3) I would really appreciate suggestions on fan/heatshink/etc

Thanks a lot,
Daniel.

[The Overclocker]

if you plan to use a quiet fan then do not get a densly finned copper heatsink, i would recomend a thermo engine or the heatsink of you choise with a delta fan running at 7 volts by connecting the negative wire to the 5 volt wire (red one)

[Intraveinous]

The Glaciator is really a great Heatsink/fan combo. It's quieter than most of the other high performace solutions and cools very well. As for Compound or shim, go with the thermal compound, even if you have a shim. Most people here use Arctic Silver II as their thermal compound of choice, but any of them are better than none at all. Be careful when you install the heatsink and you shouldn't have to worry about a shim. Another possible option is the Zalman CNPS-5000+. It's designed to be quiet. The thing that makes it a tough sell is that to cool something faster like an Athlon XP, you'd need to either put a high speed fan on it (loud) or a fan adaptor and a mid speed 80mm case fan on there. People have gotten excellent results from both methods.
Hope this helps!
Peace
John

[azhari]

Originally posted by dcarrera
2) Secondly, I really want a farily quiet fan. I want this computer on 24/7 and I want to be able to sleep confortably with it in my room.

I would say your only option, if you plan to go to faster AMD chips later on, is water cooling. Its the only way to get efficient cooling and quiet. Air cooling just isn't quiet by nature, for AMD chips anyways, because you need a lot of airflow to cool these very hot chips. As it stands for now Large Airflow = Lots of Noise .