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Cool­ing, cool­ing, cool­ing. I have become obsessed with air­flow, fans, quiet­ness and CPU tem­per­at­ures. A cooler CPU and memory, and the faster you can make your PC.

The first major invest­ment: Zall­man CPU Fan replace­ment. The oper­a­tion to install this into the CPU case took about an hour. Res­ult: 5-7degC tem­per­at­ure drop in the CPU. The 8″ fan sucks are from the rear, and through cop­per fins to the front. The air cool­ing lowers CPU tem­per­at­ure, and there­fore raises performance.

At the same time, I inves­ted in 8Gb of Geil RAM. Noth­ing like hav­ing as much RAM as afford­able in your new desktop machine. Along with the NVidia 8800GT, it’s a scream­ing machine. A grunkenstation.

The new desk arrived last week­end, and Gen­eral Melchett fits neatly into the PC cup­board: hid­den in the below picture.

The two 22″ Dell LCD mon­it­ors fit 10mm under­neath the shelf.

Now I am ready to spend the sum­mer bas­ketweav­ing, test­ing Win­dows Vista x64 and other bits that are lying around at Microsoft. And blog about it, too.