I have a secondary system in our house, which is a bit of a Frankenstein's monster; it comprises of spare parts, hand-me-downs from upgrades and basically anything I can get my hands on! It used run off an old Pentium D chip I had from a few years back and recently I managed to acquire an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400, which I thought would make an excellent upgrade to the system. Unfortunately, after I switched processors, I found the stock Intel cooler that shipped with the Pentium was clearly not able to dissipate the heat generated by Core 2 chip; temps were around 80°C while idling! I ended up abandoning the system for a while until yesterday when I installed the Arctic Freezer 7 Pro I had left over from installing an H80i in my primary rig. I also used the Arctic Silver 5 paste I had left over from that upgrade as well; I needed to try everything to help keep the CPU running cool, especially as I wanted to try my hand at overclocking the chip at some point.
The process took me a couple of hours in total, and I took plenty of pictures to document it all. Afterwards, I was extremely happy to see idle temps around 30°C and just over 55°C at full load. Please be kind; the poor system is still residing in an old biege box I used to have for my primary system years ago, before I built my current gaming system. A new case is probably the only thing I'm considering actually buying specifically for this rig; I've been eyeing up the Cooler Master HAF XB LAN Box.
Here's the system with the stock cooler installed:
A close up of the stock cooler:
The CPU, once I had removed the stock cooler and cleaned off the old thermal paste:
The Arctic Freezer Pro cooler mount, which is only used for Intel (LGA755 to be precise) installations:
A small blob of Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste on the CPU, before I commenced tinting:
Using an old BCS membership card, I smoothed out that blob across the CPU (tinting):
I did the same to the underside of the cooler:
For the E6400, Arctic Silver recommend the vertical line method for applying the paste, however, I think I may have got mixed up here and accidentally gone with a horizontal line method:
This is the new cooler in place:
A final shot of the case for comparison:
