Caltrops - American McGee's Honda Civic





	[quote name="Horrible Gelatinous Blob"]This is different, because I've already built my new system -- I just have a couple of niggling questions and concerns. My setup: Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard Dual core Opteron 175 BFG Geforce 7800 GTX 512MB 4 gigs DDR400 RAM (2 Gigs Corsair, 2 Gigs CompUSA PNY RAM I got from some kid at school); only 3 gigs is available for use, however Sony DVD+-RW Drive Lite-On DVD+-RW Drive 2 500 GB SATA Drives Memory card reader Floppy drive 1) Should I go ahead and get a separate sound card instead of using the onboard audio? Does the onboard audio really demand a significant amount of CPU resources? I'm not a big audiophile, but if my performance will be noticably improved by jamming a $40 sound card in there, I'm all for it. 2) Right now, my system idles at about 50 degrees C with the case on and locked and 45 degrees C with the case open. Although my old Pentium 4 2.4GHz system regularly ran at temps around 51-55 degrees C, I understand that is rather hot. We don't have central air, and the living room (which just has a ceiling fan) probably gets up to the low 80s during the day. Despite this, is the CPU still running exceptionally hot? If so, is it from a misapplication of thermal paste? I've got <a href="http://www.thermaltake.com/coolers/venus/rs/a1744.htm">this heatsink and fan</a> on the processor, since I bought it OEM. Obviously, there is an airflow problem as well, but what can I do to resolve that? The case already has three fans; I understand that a cooling duct would help, but it doesn't appear that the duct that looks like it would be the most helpful (<a href="http://www.pccasegear.com/prod3020.htm">this one</a>) is available in the US. I don't really want to build my own, but I will if I must. Should I just cut my losses and look into liquid cooling at this stage? That's probably enough for now. I'm just eager to be done with the tweaking and troubleshooting and ready to close up the case and actually use the damn machine without having to open it for a good long while.[/quote]