Well, the nice FedEx man showed up today with a little package from NewEgg.com: Arctic-Cooling's Super Silent 4Pro L. I can actually run my machine (P4c, 3GHz, 533MHz FSB) with a 2000RPM CPU fan (although it's quiet enough to move it to 3000RPM “just in case”). The Intel one wouldn't run at less than 3700RPM, and that's after a very cold boot, with a glass of ice inside the case.

To test it out, I ran a little keygenerator program which taxes my CPU. I ran two instances to make sure that each core would get a beating. Temp went up to about 60. That's all. And the fan was still running nice and quiet at 2500 or 3000 RPM. Cooled off instantly. Why can't Intel ship a good fan/heatsink combo like this in each processor box? With the old one, running a test like that would push the fan to about 6000RPM, and the whole thing would vibrate like it was about to take off.

Actually, I'm thankful that my machine is even running right now. It's been a long time since I've done any real hardware work, and I've never worked with thermal paste or Socket 487 restrainers (in fact, I took out the entire MB just to figure it out!). Guess I can still do those kinds of things :)