Heat Sinks

So I had promised to keep you all updated as I go through the Linux II the Revenge build, so here is the latest. The latest is: frostytech.com rocks. Frostytech is a website that reviews CPU heat sinks. That's all it does. But it does it well. They review their coolers in terms of noise and thermal performance (which is the whole point of a cooler, after all) and even provide an up to date top 10 list. Turns out that the coolest heatsinks are not the most quiet, which is to be expected. If you hook a Dyson vacuum up to your system you'll keep it pretty cool, but it'll be a bit noisy. Also turns out, to my regret, that the beautiful Zalman heatsinks I was looking at are not rated anywhere nearly as quiet as I had hoped. At high speeds they're just as noisy as the stock fans that come with the CPU's! They cool the CPU a whole lot better, but since the whole goal here is to be QUIET, and since I'm not likely to need to do a lot of overclocking on the Linux box, it seems Zalman is not for me. So instead I'm going to go with a Scythe Zipang 2. No, I have no idea what Zipang means. Most of the other coolers that Scythe makes have names like, I kid you not, the Katana, the Ninja, the Shuriken, and the Big Shuriken. Given the options, I'm just as glad the one I'm going for has a name that sounds like it came from Ikea instead of Dawn of the Ninja. The Zipang has very good specs for both noise and cooling, and costs only about $10 more than the Zalman. On the down side, it's no where near as cool looking: