Hello,
I'm a newbie when it comes to building computers. I built my first computer ever a few months ago, but the noise has been driving me insane - especially since I built this to be an audio workstation!
Basically, if possible, I would like to replace ONLY the fan, and leave the heatsink that came with the board on. So here are my couple of questions:
*Does the heatsink have anything to do wih the noise besides keeping temperatures low for the fan?
*What size fans fit best on the stock heatsinks?
*Is there a particular fan that works exceptionally well at keeping noise down and keeping things cool?
I've read the whole thread a few times, and have found a lot of helpful information. Thank you everyone who has been helping for so long!
Thanks in advance,
-Daniel Rheaume
My system
MSI K8T-Master 2 Far
(x1) Opteron 246
1gb Samsung Registered RAM
Rackmount Case (built by someone online - don't know the brand)
(x2) 200 GB Seagate Hard Drive
ATI Radeon 9000
If you have two matched stock heatsinks, they both take 70mm x 15mm fans. You can find these at various places online, try http://www.svc.com or http://www.newegg.com. If you have one of the offset heatsinks, it takes 60mm fans. You can verify this by measuring the edge with a ruler.
70mm is an oddball size halfway between the extremely common 60mm and 80mm sizes. As far as brand goes, I can't recommend any one brand in particular but if you read the fans' specifications it should tell you anything you need to know. Quiet in my book is <32dBA though your mileage may vary. You'll want as much airflow as you can get, try to find specifications on the stock fan to get an idea for how much it provides.
Drasnor,
Thank you for such a quick and helpful reply.
I just wanted to clarify one thing: Are you saying then that it is possible to get noise down to quiet levels by replacing only the fan and not the heatsink?
More for Drasnor, or anybody else that would like to help:
I see a lot of fans that have about 28 Cfm. However, I vaguely remember reading on this board that the stock fan was about 43 Cfm.
Did I read right? If so, is this a huge difference? Do I make up for the difference with a good case fan?
(I'm using the stock case fan right now and plan to upgrade at the same time.)
One last thing: I noticed when you (Drasnor) were talking about your specs, I noticed that the RPM was fairly low for the amount of air it was blowing. Do I want to look for lower RPM along with the other specs?
Yes, it is possible to get noise down to quiet levels by replacing only the fan but not the heatsink. The problem is though that if the fan control in the K8T's BIOS is kicking the fans up to full speed then they aren't moving enough air through the heatsink. However, you may have the fan control disabled in your BIOS (full speed all the time).
I don't use the stock heatsinks but instead use larger, heavier ones that take 80mm fans. Generally speaking, larger the fan, the lower the RPM needed to move a given amount of air. Also, usually the lower the RPM the quieter the fan.
Typically most 70mm^2 x 15mm thick fans move about the same amount of air as any other for a given RPM setting. If your speed control is disabled then first I would try running the machine with it enabled for a bit and see if the machine can manage without kicking into higher RPMs. It'll be very noticable, going from a quiet whirr to the vacuum cleaner sound nearly instantly.
If it stays quiet for a few days at full load I'd leave it as is, but if it can't manage I would open up the BIOS and check the PC Health monitor and get the fan speeds at full and quiet and take the average. Then I'd start looking for fans that spin at about that speed.
If you find some 70mm^2 x 25mm thick fans they will most likely have higher flow rates and lower noise than similar 15mm thick fans. However, you may need new screws to hold it onto the heatsink.
I don't really think a nicer case fan can help you here. The processor heatsink is designed to exchange heat between the processor and the air in the case. If that process is inefficient it really doesn't matter how much air you cycle through the case.
I wonder if a much larger fan could be placed on top of both heatsinks replacing the two smaller ones. This could reduce the noise, but I guess the problem would be that each heatsink is now only getting air from a smaller sector of the fan diameter.
I design servers for a large computer company, and becasue of redundancy requirements, we are unable to use fans mounted to the heatsinks, so we cool them by moving a lot of air through the chassis. This requires that the heatsinks have a much larger surface area, which would not work with this mother board as the available area is already being used. Also the fan placement would have to be optimized for this, and in most consumer chassis, you do not get that choise.
I would say the best solution would be same or similar to Drasnor's or if you like to mess around with liquid cooling, this would make it even quieter.
It's a different story with rack chassis than for desktop cases. You can get away with it in rack chassis because the chassis is designed to duct air blowing through the front across large passive heatsinks and straight out the back. They aren't really passive, just part of a very elegant integrated cooling solution. Also, rack chassis that do this tend to be fairly loud, especially the small ones (1U).
Fan adapters exist but they don't work well airflow-wise. Most axial fans produce low static pressure and are unable to move their full capacity through the couplers (the air stagnates instead of accelerating). The exception is squirrel cage blowers or some other kind of centrifugal fan but most blowers are fairly loud. Some exist that may meet your requirements however you may run into trouble due to their height.
You are right. The whole chassis is designed around the cooling requirements and there are all kinds of air baffles and stuff to channel the air through the critical components. I was trying to say that with an off-the-shelf chassis, doing all this stuff would be inpractical. And even after doing all this, servers are not exactly what I would call quiet.
I will one of these days try the Freezer 4 as blueox or nicklogan showed earlier on this thread. I think that should quiet things a bit.
This is all really fascinating to me. Again, I am newbie so please bear with the basic questions.
Right now my fans (120mm case fan, stock msi heatsinkfan) are both running at full speed. Using CoreCenterPro (the temp program that comes with the board) I can see that my temperatures stop rising at around 31 deg. celsius for system, and about 32 deg. celsius for the CPU. The only way I keep it that low is by taking the filter off of the case fan. But that makes it really loud! When it's all closed up, it actually isnt' terrible.
From what I've read, I guess that my computer is underestimating the real temperature. So, what do you recommend as a safe temperature to peak at?
I'm sorry if what I'm saying doesn't make much sense.
What I think I mean is, maybe I can lower the speed of my fans if the computer is still cool enough...what is cool enough using CoreCenterPro's temp guage?
Check in your BIOS under PC Health for something along the lines of Smart CPU fan control and see if it's enabled. If it is, you have a cooling problem. If not, enable it and see if you can run that way without the motherboard flipping the fans into high speed.
32 C is a great CPU temperature. My board overestimated my processor temperatures but I've never heard of a board underestimating them. My Opterons would run at an indicated temperature of ~45 C - 48 C but now run much cooler on my new motherboard which accepts Thermalright XP-120's though I don't have temps on it just yet since finding hardware monitoring software for Linux hasn't been a priority for me. Anything under 50 C is acceptable for me, anything under 40 C is desirable. Anything over 50 C was unacceptable and anything over 60 C was danger.
Keep in mind I run first generation Opterons (.13 micron Sledgehammers).
.... on my new motherboard which accepts Thermalright XP-120's ....
Hi Drasnor
Thank you for your help - its almost as if MSI had support
You say your new board accepts the Thermalrights - which board is that if I may ask?
I did the adaptation of the 462 heatsink and used quiet fans but run them at full speed - but it is still too noisy. Now I will either buy a new board, I will try watercooling or I will try yet another cooling solution.
I have no idea if my board overestimates temp so I dont think I like experimenting with resticting power to the fans (corecenter says 46 and 42 degrees celcius for the cpus and 35 degrees for syst.)
In total expenses I am not far from the same amount a Tyan board would have cost me first place - that should teach me...
I use a Supermicro H8DCE purchased from Monarch Computer. It's officially an OEM board so Supermicro isn't obligated to provide tech support but I haven't had any trouble going through Monarch when my first one was DOA. My only gripe is that it's E-ATX and I had to buy a new, larger case to hold it.
I know this is old, but I need help. I recently got the dual setup and prepare to build a home use server. I got the motherboard off of ebay and discovered the heat sink retention clips are not included. I have the stock hsf, but now in need of the heat sink retention real bad. I've just finished reading all the posts in this thread and it looks like you guys mod the brackets to mount better heat sinks. For me on the other hand, I don't need better hsf because the server will be somewhere where no-one cares and I don't want to spend a lot of money to do a mod. Does anyone knows where I can get the retention clips? Or if you mod yours and still have the old ones, can I buy it off of you?
I have seen that link in this thread, but I thought that was for installation with their CPU-300 and CPU-305 water cooling kit. So, can I just buy that part (CPU-S06) and it'll fit my stock hsf?
He was installing different heat sinks, but the reason for buying the adapter, I believe was that his board had only come with mounting brackets on one of the sockets, so he had to buy the adapter shown on the link to be able to install the second one. But perhaps I am missunderstanding, so I will let someone else answer the question because i don't wand to guide you in the wrong direction.
With my mobo, only 1 retention clip was included, so I had to get the retention clip from Koolance.
I am using the Freezer 4 and lately I had PC shutdown problems when trying to encode movies. I have realized that the Freezer 4 cooler is ultra silent but it has 1 big minus as its surface is smaller than the metal Opteron cooling surface, which means that the CPU is not cooled enough, so I have to look for new coolers which will remain at the same noise level as Freezer 4s from Arctic Cooling ('bout 0.8 sone or 16dba)
I realise this is a very long ongoing thread, however, I too am having the same problems!
The supplied MSI fans are just way too noisy! Searching for alternatives seems like a minefield though, particularly with my GEforce 6800 already touching the mounting bracket of my bottom CPU fan!
Any suggestions? Current spec is Dual Opteron 252, 6gb RAM, GeForce 6800 Ultra, 300gb SATA HDD, etc.
All I really want is for someone to say "buy this CPU cooler, it fits and it works!"
I doubt if you will be able to find EVER a cooler for this badly desinged mobo.
Especially the cooling part of this board is not possible when running a dual CPU.
If you check the tests below, you will notice that there are 3 major faults concerning the K8T Master2-FAR.
Having this in mind, I doubt we will be able to overide our problem.
I'm already seeking on buying a new mobo with a PCI-X slot and more peripherals on-board (ie.SATA2, firewire etc).
I finally replaced my K8T Master2-FAR motherboard.
I have made a new PC & very fast.
Motherboard: MSI K9N Diamond
CPU: AMD 64 X2 5200 AM2
Memory: Kingston 4x512mb HyperX 800MHz
When running a benchmark with my old PC, the new PC is 50% faster than the dual 246 Opterons and 400% faster in memory.
I'm happy
Ancient thread I know, but I just came across two Opteron 252 and resurrected an old K8N Master2-FAR system of mine. I ordered two NH-U9DX xeon coolers (heatsink+fan) from Noctua [1] and I'm praying that I'll be able to fit them on this cramped MB.
Now my question (drasnor, perhaps you're still here?); Since I only have one GPU, would it be possible to move it to the lower PCIe x16 slot, or must it be in the first PCIe x16 slot?
I don't have a PSU for the system yet, so I can't just try.
If I'm able to move the graphics card to the lower PCIe x16 slot than I think I might have a bigger chance to fit the coolers.
Generally speaking, you can plug any PCI-E card into any PCI-E slot but in practice card performance is also related to the lane configuration of the slots. A lot of the nForce4 SLI boards only put 8 lanes to each x16 slot instead of the full 16 because the chipset lacked sufficient lanes to fill both slots and have some left over for a few x1 or x4 slots. A few boards were even screwier; putting 16 lanes to the top slot and 4 to the bottom. Nvidia made a HT peripheral that added more PCI-E lanes but only a few expensive motherboards used it.
The motherboard manual is a little vague but it looks like both slots are configured with the full 16-lanes though they're PCI-E 1.0 only. In that case, you'll get the same performance from either slot and it shouldn't matter which one you use.
Ancient thread I know, but I just came across two Opteron 252 and resurrected an old K8N Master2-FAR system of mine. I ordered two NH-U9DX xeon coolers (heatsink+fan) from Noctua [1] and I'm praying that I'll be able to fit them on this cramped MB.
Now my question (drasnor, perhaps you're still here?); Since I only have one GPU, would it be possible to move it to the lower PCIe x16 slot, or must it be in the first PCIe x16 slot?
I don't have a PSU for the system yet, so I can't just try.
If I'm able to move the graphics card to the lower PCIe x16 slot than I think I might have a bigger chance to fit the coolers.
It's an odd coincidence that you should post this today - I had my MSI KT8 MASTER2-FAR/ Opteron 244 system idle for over a year and finally got back to it and tracked the problem to bad ram and got it running again just this morning.
I think you will be able to mount the card in either slot but others may know better - I have a BFG Nvidia GEForce 6800 GS in the AGP slot so I don't really know. I'm still using the Freezer4's and bought extras before they seemed to go off the market. I had one fan go bad so far.
I sold my board a few years back and used the core components to fill out a Tyan Transport 1U barebones server box. It's a good server even if it is loud as hell.
Generally speaking, you can plug any PCI-E card into any PCI-E slot but in practice card performance is also related to the lane configuration of the slots. A lot of the nForce4 SLI boards only put 8 lanes to each x16 slot instead of the full 16 because the chipset lacked sufficient lanes to fill both slots and have some left over for a few x1 or x4 slots. A few boards were even screwier; putting 16 lanes to the top slot and 4 to the bottom. Nvidia made a HT peripheral that added more PCI-E lanes but only a few expensive motherboards used it.
The motherboard manual is a little vague but it looks like both slots are configured with the full 16-lanes though they're PCI-E 1.0 only. In that case, you'll get the same performance from either slot and it shouldn't matter which one you use.
It's an odd coincidence that you should post this today - I had my MSI KT8 MASTER2-FAR/ Opteron 244 system idle for over a year and finally got back to it and tracked the problem to bad ram and got it running again just this morning.
The Noctua Xeon cooler I was thinking of will not fit (naturally, since it needs big through-board holes). Instead I got two Swiftech MCX-VPro [1] Xeon heatsinks from eBay and bought two Noctua NF-R8 fans. These heatsinks can mount on old first-gen 603/604 style stuff. I also took the opportunity and got two Noctua NF-S12B FLX case fans to replace the ones that came with my Silverstone TJ05 case. I also replaced the noisy northbridge fan with a passive heatsink from Zalman. The machine is now quieter than ever!
Regarding the Swiftech MCX-VPro and this board. They will fit, and you will even be able to have a graphics card in the first PCIe x16 slot, though I have mine in the second since I think it's too close to the hot CPU. Though if you're going to fit a card in the first slot, _nothing_ must stick out from the card.
As drasnor has already explained though, the screw holes on the MSI mounting plate mechanism are M3 holes, and the MCX-VPro comes with 6-32 screws. So I had to go to a hardware shop and get eight 30 mm M3 screws. I also had to take away about 1/3 from each of the springs that come with the MCX-VPro mounting mechanism, as the spacers provided by Swiftech won't fit in the M3 holes. So instead the M3 screws I got go straight down to the MSI holes.
Anyway, not so tricky, and MUCH better than the MSI-provided fans.
Comments
I'm a newbie when it comes to building computers. I built my first computer ever a few months ago, but the noise has been driving me insane - especially since I built this to be an audio workstation!
Basically, if possible, I would like to replace ONLY the fan, and leave the heatsink that came with the board on. So here are my couple of questions:
*Does the heatsink have anything to do wih the noise besides keeping temperatures low for the fan?
*What size fans fit best on the stock heatsinks?
*Is there a particular fan that works exceptionally well at keeping noise down and keeping things cool?
I've read the whole thread a few times, and have found a lot of helpful information. Thank you everyone who has been helping for so long!
Thanks in advance,
-Daniel Rheaume
My system
MSI K8T-Master 2 Far
(x1) Opteron 246
1gb Samsung Registered RAM
Rackmount Case (built by someone online - don't know the brand)
(x2) 200 GB Seagate Hard Drive
ATI Radeon 9000
70mm is an oddball size halfway between the extremely common 60mm and 80mm sizes. As far as brand goes, I can't recommend any one brand in particular but if you read the fans' specifications it should tell you anything you need to know. Quiet in my book is <32dBA though your mileage may vary. You'll want as much airflow as you can get, try to find specifications on the stock fan to get an idea for how much it provides.
-drasnor
Thank you for such a quick and helpful reply.
I just wanted to clarify one thing: Are you saying then that it is possible to get noise down to quiet levels by replacing only the fan and not the heatsink?
More for Drasnor, or anybody else that would like to help:
I see a lot of fans that have about 28 Cfm. However, I vaguely remember reading on this board that the stock fan was about 43 Cfm.
Did I read right? If so, is this a huge difference? Do I make up for the difference with a good case fan?
(I'm using the stock case fan right now and plan to upgrade at the same time.)
One last thing: I noticed when you (Drasnor) were talking about your specs, I noticed that the RPM was fairly low for the amount of air it was blowing. Do I want to look for lower RPM along with the other specs?
Thanks so much!
-Daniel
Yes, it is possible to get noise down to quiet levels by replacing only the fan but not the heatsink. The problem is though that if the fan control in the K8T's BIOS is kicking the fans up to full speed then they aren't moving enough air through the heatsink. However, you may have the fan control disabled in your BIOS (full speed all the time).
I don't use the stock heatsinks but instead use larger, heavier ones that take 80mm fans. Generally speaking, larger the fan, the lower the RPM needed to move a given amount of air. Also, usually the lower the RPM the quieter the fan.
Typically most 70mm^2 x 15mm thick fans move about the same amount of air as any other for a given RPM setting. If your speed control is disabled then first I would try running the machine with it enabled for a bit and see if the machine can manage without kicking into higher RPMs. It'll be very noticable, going from a quiet whirr to the vacuum cleaner sound nearly instantly.
If it stays quiet for a few days at full load I'd leave it as is, but if it can't manage I would open up the BIOS and check the PC Health monitor and get the fan speeds at full and quiet and take the average. Then I'd start looking for fans that spin at about that speed.
If you find some 70mm^2 x 25mm thick fans they will most likely have higher flow rates and lower noise than similar 15mm thick fans. However, you may need new screws to hold it onto the heatsink.
I don't really think a nicer case fan can help you here. The processor heatsink is designed to exchange heat between the processor and the air in the case. If that process is inefficient it really doesn't matter how much air you cycle through the case.
-drasnor
I design servers for a large computer company, and becasue of redundancy requirements, we are unable to use fans mounted to the heatsinks, so we cool them by moving a lot of air through the chassis. This requires that the heatsinks have a much larger surface area, which would not work with this mother board as the available area is already being used. Also the fan placement would have to be optimized for this, and in most consumer chassis, you do not get that choise.
I would say the best solution would be same or similar to Drasnor's or if you like to mess around with liquid cooling, this would make it even quieter.
Fan adapters exist but they don't work well airflow-wise. Most axial fans produce low static pressure and are unable to move their full capacity through the couplers (the air stagnates instead of accelerating). The exception is squirrel cage blowers or some other kind of centrifugal fan but most blowers are fairly loud. Some exist that may meet your requirements however you may run into trouble due to their height.
-drasnor
You are right. The whole chassis is designed around the cooling requirements and there are all kinds of air baffles and stuff to channel the air through the critical components. I was trying to say that with an off-the-shelf chassis, doing all this stuff would be inpractical. And even after doing all this, servers are not exactly what I would call quiet.
I will one of these days try the Freezer 4 as blueox or nicklogan showed earlier on this thread. I think that should quiet things a bit.
Right now my fans (120mm case fan, stock msi heatsinkfan) are both running at full speed. Using CoreCenterPro (the temp program that comes with the board) I can see that my temperatures stop rising at around 31 deg. celsius for system, and about 32 deg. celsius for the CPU. The only way I keep it that low is by taking the filter off of the case fan. But that makes it really loud! When it's all closed up, it actually isnt' terrible.
From what I've read, I guess that my computer is underestimating the real temperature. So, what do you recommend as a safe temperature to peak at?
I'm sorry if what I'm saying doesn't make much sense.
What I think I mean is, maybe I can lower the speed of my fans if the computer is still cool enough...what is cool enough using CoreCenterPro's temp guage?
Thank you all so much!!
-Daniel
32 C is a great CPU temperature. My board overestimated my processor temperatures but I've never heard of a board underestimating them. My Opterons would run at an indicated temperature of ~45 C - 48 C but now run much cooler on my new motherboard which accepts Thermalright XP-120's though I don't have temps on it just yet since finding hardware monitoring software for Linux hasn't been a priority for me. Anything under 50 C is acceptable for me, anything under 40 C is desirable. Anything over 50 C was unacceptable and anything over 60 C was danger.
Keep in mind I run first generation Opterons (.13 micron Sledgehammers).
-drasnor
Hi Drasnor
Thank you for your help - its almost as if MSI had support
You say your new board accepts the Thermalrights - which board is that if I may ask?
I did the adaptation of the 462 heatsink and used quiet fans but run them at full speed - but it is still too noisy. Now I will either buy a new board, I will try watercooling or I will try yet another cooling solution.
I have no idea if my board overestimates temp so I dont think I like experimenting with resticting power to the fans (corecenter says 46 and 42 degrees celcius for the cpus and 35 degrees for syst.)
In total expenses I am not far from the same amount a Tyan board would have cost me first place - that should teach me...
Kind regards
3dfreelancer
-drasnor
I know this is old, but I need help. I recently got the dual setup and prepare to build a home use server. I got the motherboard off of ebay and discovered the heat sink retention clips are not included. I have the stock hsf, but now in need of the heat sink retention real bad. I've just finished reading all the posts in this thread and it looks like you guys mod the brackets to mount better heat sinks. For me on the other hand, I don't need better hsf because the server will be somewhere where no-one cares and I don't want to spend a lot of money to do a mod. Does anyone knows where I can get the retention clips? Or if you mod yours and still have the old ones, can I buy it off of you?
Thanks,
SyzygyLock
Edit: spellings
http://www.koolance.com/shop/product_info.php?cPath=25_35&products_id=103
Should be what you need.
I am using the Freezer 4 and lately I had PC shutdown problems when trying to encode movies. I have realized that the Freezer 4 cooler is ultra silent but it has 1 big minus as its surface is smaller than the metal Opteron cooling surface, which means that the CPU is not cooled enough, so I have to look for new coolers which will remain at the same noise level as Freezer 4s from Arctic Cooling ('bout 0.8 sone or 16dba)
Any opinions are welcome.
The supplied MSI fans are just way too noisy! Searching for alternatives seems like a minefield though, particularly with my GEforce 6800 already touching the mounting bracket of my bottom CPU fan!
Any suggestions? Current spec is Dual Opteron 252, 6gb RAM, GeForce 6800 Ultra, 300gb SATA HDD, etc.
All I really want is for someone to say "buy this CPU cooler, it fits and it works!"
Cheers
:Rocker:
I doubt if you will be able to find EVER a cooler for this badly desinged mobo.
Especially the cooling part of this board is not possible when running a dual CPU.
If you check the tests below, you will notice that there are 3 major faults concerning the K8T Master2-FAR.
http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=dualduel&page=3
Having this in mind, I doubt we will be able to overide our problem.
I'm already seeking on buying a new mobo with a PCI-X slot and more peripherals on-board (ie.SATA2, firewire etc).
I have made a new PC & very fast.
Motherboard: MSI K9N Diamond
CPU: AMD 64 X2 5200 AM2
Memory: Kingston 4x512mb HyperX 800MHz
When running a benchmark with my old PC, the new PC is 50% faster than the dual 246 Opterons and 400% faster in memory.
I'm happy
Ancient thread I know, but I just came across two Opteron 252 and resurrected an old K8N Master2-FAR system of mine. I ordered two NH-U9DX xeon coolers (heatsink+fan) from Noctua [1] and I'm praying that I'll be able to fit them on this cramped MB.
Now my question (drasnor, perhaps you're still here?); Since I only have one GPU, would it be possible to move it to the lower PCIe x16 slot, or must it be in the first PCIe x16 slot?
I don't have a PSU for the system yet, so I can't just try.
If I'm able to move the graphics card to the lower PCIe x16 slot than I think I might have a bigger chance to fit the coolers.
Best regards,
Elvis
[1] http://www.noctua.at/main.php?show=productview&products_id=20&lng=en
Generally speaking, you can plug any PCI-E card into any PCI-E slot but in practice card performance is also related to the lane configuration of the slots. A lot of the nForce4 SLI boards only put 8 lanes to each x16 slot instead of the full 16 because the chipset lacked sufficient lanes to fill both slots and have some left over for a few x1 or x4 slots. A few boards were even screwier; putting 16 lanes to the top slot and 4 to the bottom. Nvidia made a HT peripheral that added more PCI-E lanes but only a few expensive motherboards used it.
The motherboard manual is a little vague but it looks like both slots are configured with the full 16-lanes though they're PCI-E 1.0 only. In that case, you'll get the same performance from either slot and it shouldn't matter which one you use.
It's an odd coincidence that you should post this today - I had my MSI KT8 MASTER2-FAR/ Opteron 244 system idle for over a year and finally got back to it and tracked the problem to bad ram and got it running again just this morning.
I think you will be able to mount the card in either slot but others may know better - I have a BFG Nvidia GEForce 6800 GS in the AGP slot so I don't really know. I'm still using the Freezer4's and bought extras before they seemed to go off the market. I had one fan go bad so far.
Thanks!
Ah, I see.
Great. Thanks for the quick reply!
The Noctua Xeon cooler I was thinking of will not fit (naturally, since it needs big through-board holes). Instead I got two Swiftech MCX-VPro [1] Xeon heatsinks from eBay and bought two Noctua NF-R8 fans. These heatsinks can mount on old first-gen 603/604 style stuff. I also took the opportunity and got two Noctua NF-S12B FLX case fans to replace the ones that came with my Silverstone TJ05 case. I also replaced the noisy northbridge fan with a passive heatsink from Zalman. The machine is now quieter than ever!
Regarding the Swiftech MCX-VPro and this board. They will fit, and you will even be able to have a graphics card in the first PCIe x16 slot, though I have mine in the second since I think it's too close to the hot CPU. Though if you're going to fit a card in the first slot, _nothing_ must stick out from the card.
As drasnor has already explained though, the screw holes on the MSI mounting plate mechanism are M3 holes, and the MCX-VPro comes with 6-32 screws. So I had to go to a hardware shop and get eight 30 mm M3 screws. I also had to take away about 1/3 from each of the springs that come with the MCX-VPro mounting mechanism, as the spacers provided by Swiftech won't fit in the M3 holes. So instead the M3 screws I got go straight down to the MSI holes.
Anyway, not so tricky, and MUCH better than the MSI-provided fans.
Cheers,
Elvis
[1] http://www.swiftnets.com/products/mcx-VPro.asp