Help with cooling in a tight spot

I am working on a custom mod that leaves me little room for well anything. The stock Intel heatsink/fan combo just fits and is about the max size I can use. The mobo is a Z68ITX-B-E with an i5 2500k lga 1155 running at the stock speed and voltage.


The issue I am having is that it is not working too well no matter what I do! When I ran Prime95 the CPU temp would spike into the 70's and was getting close to 80 after about 15min of run time. I opened the case to see if I could determine if the issue was airflow in the case and it changed the temp only by about 1 to 2 c max.


Also from what I was reading it seems thermal paste has changed a bit since I last looked into it. Is Arctic Silver 5 a thing of a time gone by?


I was hoping to find a fan/heatsink combo that is known to work good for cooling at stock speeds. As I said before I have little room and can not for the life of me find a cooler that will fit in the space other then the stock


I need a damned good small cooler that is not water!

I take it that cooler height is the main holdup for you, right. I would recommend a Prolimatech Samuel 17 along with a 120 x 12 or 120 x 20 mm fan. Even with a standard 120 x 25 mm case fan you will still be only around 70 mm installed height with that cooler. Plus, it is good enough for moderate overclocking if you want to do that too. I tested this cooler for review on the front page and found that it could cool an i7 930 to around 3.6 or so, so you should have plenty of thermal headroom with that 2500k. For my review, I bought the 120 x 20 mm fans and the 120 x 12 mm fans from Jab-tech.

muddocktor said:

I take it that cooler height is the main holdup for you, right. I would recommend a Prolimatech Samuel 17 along with a 120 x 12 or 120 x 20 mm fan. Even with a standard 120 x 25 mm case fan you will still be only around 70 mm installed height with that cooler. Plus, it is good enough for moderate overclocking if you want to do that too. I tested this cooler for review on the front page and found that it could cool an i7 930 to around 3.6 or so, so you should have plenty of thermal headroom with that 2500k. For my review, I bought the 120 x 20 mm fans and the 120 x 12 mm fans from Jab-tech.

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This is the right direction for what I am after still too big for the space. Just pulled out a ruler and it looks like its on the safe side I have 90mm x 90mm x 60mm of space to work with. The motherboard has an onboard GPU with cooler as well as the ram is close to the CPU so the space I have to work with to start is governed by that.

Frostytech has some charts. They're a bit out of date, though. Maybe one of these could fit? http://www.frostytech.com/top5_lowprofile_heatsinks.cfm

AS5 is rather old. Pick up some MX-4, it's good, cheap, and good for 2C or so.