may I suggest that cleaning your heatsink alone may resolve this problem. I run several P4s and some do run over 60 degrees without any problem. The older P4 from my experience always ran a bit hot.

A P4 such as yours is rated up to 72.8 degrees (case temp) before having any problems. I wouldn't worry about it too much. Clean out the heatsink, like everyone else says, and maybe vacuum up the dust building up in the intake vents on your chassis as well.



This actually dissipates more heat than a Q6600 (115 Watts, versus either 105 or 95 Watts for a Q6600, depending on whether you have a B3 or G0 stepping)




That isn't really true, as it's much better than the Intel stock cooler, which is already "sufficient" for cooling a Q6600.

Ultimately, it depends how cool you want it or if you are overclocking heavily - saying that, I know people that have got a q6600 way beyond 3 GHz with a Arctic Freezer Pro 7. In general though, people are a bit over the top when cooling their processors. A Q6600 is rated to run safely up to 71 degrees C case temp. Still, I guess it's best to be on the safe side, especially if you are running your CPU at 100% at all times.

Interestingly though, overclocking types are more than happy to run their CPUs with way overspec voltages... yet are always obsessed with low temps. These both have similar impacts on the proper functioning and lifetime of the processor, as far as I'm aware.

ive been using a thermaltake hsf for years this one ..

not trying to advertize or what not..
but i have used many different hsf,s and theese seem to perform the best and are fairly quiet....

From the pictures, it looks like it needs a back plate for support. If so, you'll have to take out the motherboard to install it. That could be an adventure - especially if you didn't build the machine yourself.

If anyone is curious about the effect of a desk fan on CPU cooling, here's my unscientific research. I pulled the side of my case off and pointed a somewhat powerful desk fan at the Cpu and all surrounding components (pretty much hits the whole interior of my case). I waited until temperatures stablised under FULL WCG load (99% processor usage while running winamp and ms paint). Ambient temperatures are about 65-70 degrees (Boston, Mass at about midnight on the 22nd).

Here's what the original temps looked like:



Then, I turned the fan off and waited for about 10 minutes for temperatures to stabilise again. Here's what the temps look like at this time:



Finally, to control for any other factors, I turned the fan back on again and waited about 5 - 10 minutes and screen shotted the SpeedFan readout again. Here are the results:



My conclusions are as follows:

1. Cases are stupid. Just turn a whacking big fan on your processor and let it deal with it.

2. It is funny to see that even with a big desk fan blowing directly on, my processor, it runs hot. Gotta love this P4 - it basically heats my room!

Am I stupid for taking the side of my case off? OpinionS?