Everything's up and running just fine and I'm sitting here listening to Elvis MP3's while typing this
For those of you who were following this, I did find the Dr. Thermal HSF too noisy. Not bad - and it would have been acceptable if the case was on a carpeted floor BUT this rig sits on a metal file cabinet (I need to look into a rubber pad to help dampen vibrations) at desktop level, and it's to my immediate left. The Dr. Thermal was a tad too noisy for that.
I went ahead and ordered a Thermalright AX7 with a quiet Sunon fan.
NICE heatsink! What a BEAST! Very quiet with the Sunon fan and the rubber isolation spacers (nice idea there!).
The AX7 was too tall and blocked the HDD tray so I removed it and relocated the HDD to a spare front bay. It's a new WDC 60Gb and very quiet so it turned out not to be a problem.
The CPU is running 10 degrees C cooler with the AX7 than the Dr. Thermal - although to be fair, I was using a pad with the Dr. Thermal because I didn't have any Artic Silver at the time I installed it (I'm using AS3 with the AX7 though) and the good case has MUCH better ventilation than the cheapie case.
According to MBM5 the CPU is running at 46 C.
VERY happy with the new rig - a good doubling in performance over the trusty old P3-1000. CPU intensive operations (Sound Forge filters, Photoshop rendering) are easily twice as fast, and SOF2 now holds a rock steady 66 fps at 1024x768 with full eyecandy (on the P3 even at 800x600 with the eyecandy turned down I'd drop to 40 fps during serious fire fights).
Onboard C-Media audio sounds great. I see no reason to use the old SBLive with it's IRQ channel sharing issues.
Now I need to put the P3-1000 in the cheap case and sell it off.
Adieu Intel, Aloha AMD!
HAPPY! HAPPY! JOY! JOY! :chug
