i am happy to tell you that i re-applied my thermal grease today and im getting a temp of 49 C while playing games (for a 2 hour period, High performance mode). 6 C cooler than before with the same room temp of 30 C.
Mobo temp 39 C, 1 C higher, probably because of a change in fan placement. I now have a fan at the front of the case, on the bottom, blowing at the HDD. So now the hot HDD air must be moving into the case.
i guess its better to have a cooler HDD with a 1 C hotter mobo, than to have the HDD sweat alone. But i don't really know if the HDD is running any cooler, other than this not so reliable way of the hotter mobo.
I will have to disappoint when i talk about the thermal grease. I was using the grease the came on the AMD stock heat sink since Dec 2007. When i asked in a local PC store for some TC like AS or CM nano, they didnt have any. But they gave me a "Dow Corning TC-1996" 0.5g, which they had lying around, for free.
I checked online and i think it comes "with the Boxed Pentium® 4 and Boxed Celeron® processors in the 478-pin FC-PGA2 package" (according to the Intel site) and it sells for $7 on the net.
Anyway it seems to work better than the old one and i cleaned the heatsink too.
I have 3 Q:
1> I have a WD Caviar Blue WD5000AAKS
( http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=301 ) HDD, can i monitor its temp? Does it have SMART?
2> Its a SATA drive, it shows up as an SCSI drive. Is that right?
3>Where the CPU temp sensor is located?
