@JAKAZZ: Great comment, thanks for your insight. Your machine has got to be wicked loud with all those fans. Hopefully you're running all wifi and wireless gear and have it in a separate room.

Artic silver 5 is what you need, it will drop your ave. temp @ 10c, but you need to follow the directions. You also need to allow a burn in time, @ 48hr of run time for optimal conductivity.

cooling fans, running 2 120's top blow holes, 2 80's blowing from rear across 120mm zalmann cpu cooler, 2 80's blowing in from the front over 4 raid discs, had 1 80 on side blowing across 7800gt w/ zalmann gpu cooler, went sli all temps in case went up @ 10c, changed to 2 120's on side of case blowing directly onto both cards,

cpu temps 31c idle, 45 cfull load

gpu temps 36c idle, 48-51c load

you can check your temps with MBM, motherboardmonitor, google it.

gpu temps use rivatuner with the hardware monitor under low level tuning tab.

just remember heat kills.

I've burnt 1 laptop ($1,200), and 1($600) computer because of heating issues.

You may want to check into Thermal Grease ($5) for maximum performance. The stuff works wonders, it's lowered my current CPU's temp by 5c. :O

PS:

Great site, nice content.

My case does have a front intake fan, but I don't turn it on to reduce the noise (it only has an 80mm fan), I find if you have a decent rear fan, and a reasonably clear case then you shouldn't have any problems with temperature. My overclocked Athlon 64 only gets to about 55C at load.

I'm curious how hot you got the processor though, I once ran an Athlon at 110C for 30 minutes by accident, but two years later its still working! I'm pretty sure the clock throttling saved your processor, it would've shut down otherwise.

Normally it is rare to see laptop cooling methods out there.

I can also say I used arctic silver for my desktop cpu, chipset heatsink AND gpu fan/heatsink. It really helps.

I have a very similar setup, and have been experiencing poor perfomance on a lot of applications.

Through some extensive research, I found out that when I had pulled the fan off my CPU to to give it the ol' stare-down, I displaced some of the thermal paste that conducts the heat to the heatsink.

Apparently, if you ever take your CPU fan off, you should apply more thermal paste to the CPU before putting the fan back on. A product called "Arctic Silver" has been highly recommended.

10 degree variances are not uncommon if proper thermal paste has not been applied. That figure is made up, as I can't recall the exact numbers indicated in the article, but that should be enough to scare people.

Perhaps I'll get around to this one day and report back. If anyone is familiar with Arctic Silver, please share your knowledge.

Also, in regards to your wind tunnel situation. The Stealth Vantec fans are pretty quiet. I've got two 120mm Stealth fans and they're way quieter than I had assumed they would be. I've also got the Antec Sonata case – which is subtitled "The quitest case available." Might have something to do with it.

@Marco: Oh man, I love water cooling! The next time I build a new machine, it'll definitely be water cooled. I just saw this new water cooling system that came with transparent tubes and colouring so the water is 'toxic' green. Awesome!

I guess that throttling is a pretty good thing. Without it you probably would have had a full meltdown

In the meanwhile I'm patting my water-cooled G5