Rubbing alcohol works fine and is what I have used in the past with no trouble. If the “special” stuff is the same price as rubbing alcohol (I doubt it) and you are in the computer store anyway then sure…go for it. Otherwise rubbing alcohol can be found in most supermarkets and pharmacies and it is cheap.
Are those wipes lint-free? Lint-free cloth is best. As mentioned coffee filters work well for this and are cheap and easily gotten (most people already have some at home).
As to the cooling we forgot to mention case cooling.
Even a good heat sink will fail if your case cooling sucks. If the heat sink just dumps hot air into the case then you will continue to have problems.
Make sure there are are intake fans and ideally exhaust fans. You need to get the hot air out and cool air in.
Also clean up the inside of the case (cable management). If the inside is a rat’s nest of cables all over that impedes good air flow.
The issue with more case fans is noise. With some effort you can find quiet (a relative thing) fans. I have eight fans in my PC and it is nearly silent but I spent a lot of time and money to get it that way. You need to know the case well to determine what size fans it can accept if you need more case cooling.
Some of the larger Cooler Master full towers with 120mm low-RPM fans do wonderfully. My Cosmos 1000 has 6x120mm fans and the only thing making any appreciable noise is the video card’s cooler–when just on the desktop and not in a game, it’s dead silent.
As Zeriel mentioned big cases can do it. Big fans tend to be quieter than small fans (they can spin at a lower RPM and still push a lot of air…high RPM = noise).
As I mentioned it was not cheap either. I really splurged on this case (which is not my actual PC but identical in everything except the video card pictured) but honestly it was worth it. Best case I have ever had (Silverstone Fortress). It is also huge but in my room sitting next to my desk it is no problem at all and actually kinda cool looking.
In the picture linked above:
1, 2 & 3: 180mm case fans (huge). Located at the bottom they draw cool air from the floor and blow “up”. Heat also naturally rises. Each fan creates a column of air so one fan for hard drives, one for video card(s) and one for CPU. The fans have their own air filter that is easily slid out for cleaning keeping dust in the case to a minimum (dust cannot drop in from above when fans are on either).
4 & 5: Noctua NH-D14 Heat Sink with dual 120mm fans (yes the heat sink is a monster and it is awesome and quiet…the fans are unique to Noctua and made to be quiet including notches in the blades that supposedly makes it quieter still (no idea if it is a gimmick but they sure are quiet).
6: Power Supply has a fan (Corsair power supply so well built and also quiet)
7: Exhaust fan (120mm).
8: CPU fan (this is the only thing that sometimes makes noise…if I really stress my GPU the fan ramps up in speed. Usually even then it is just noticeable but if it hits max RPM it screams…it has never needed to do that though).
All told in a dead quiet room at idle you can barely hear it. When gaming the fan speeds up some on the video card but even then it is minor and only noticeable if you pay attention and listen for it.
It doesn’t compromise your cooling. 120mm fans can push the same amount of air as 80mm fans at much lower RPMs and hence much lower noise. Also, the original claim of 8 fans didn’t mention 8 chassis fans, he might be including his CPU, video card, and PSU fans in the count and could have only 5 chassis fans.
The Raven 2 is such a great case. I feel bad for people who get talked into buying the Corsair 600T over it. The cooling performance difference is huge and the RV2 (or FT02) is probably the only case that really can deliver top-notch cooling and near silence thanks to its three AP181 fans (or do you have the old honeycomb patterned ones?).
Have you thought about putting a Thermalright Shaman on your GPU? It’s supposed to be the thing if you want to kill noise. Doesn’t work if you have SLI though, since it’s so big.
I have the fans with the honeycomb on them. My video card barely fits. Some of the newest, high-end Nvidia cards will not quite fit unless you remove the honeycomb (or cut out part of the one blocking the video card).
In my case I bought the ASUS ROG Matrix video card. It sold at a premium because it is slightly overclocked out of the box but that extra performance was rather minimal (it can be overclocked further). The main reason I splurged there was due to keeping an eye on air cooling. I have done water cooling and did not want to do it again but knew I had to be serious about cooling with air given that this is a power gaming rig so will be stressed and cooking (the computer can heat my room by itself).
So, the main reason for that card was because it had a custom cooling system on it. I was disappointed that they did not seem to care about noise overly much but the main thing is the cooling system is sealed to the card. Most GPU coolers just blow the hot air into the case. This one specifically exhausts air out the back (“up” in my case) without heating the interior.
As mentioned, even playing a modern game with settings on high, the card only ramps up one notch to the next higher fan speed and at that speed you can hear it but only just. For fun I have manually put the fan to 100% and then it is loud as hell. Fortunately with that big ass fan blowing cool air right at the intake for the video card it barely breaks a sweat.
And yeah, the Raven/Fortress are simply awesome cases. They are expensive as hell and not small or light but I think the price is worth it given I can reuse it for years. Small/light are not a concern for me (I do not take my computer to LAN parties). I seriously considered the Raven and I forget why I skipped it in favor of the Fortress. Personally I like the more elegant lines of the Fortress but whatever floats your boat. Either is an excellent case.
Regarding fan noise; this box came with a big ass fan which fits over the big ass heat sink and it has always been noisy when the CPU is busy. When I purchased (wasted my money) the thermal pads I also bought a PCI slot fan to add some more air flow in the hopes of cooling the inside more.
Heat sinks definitely need fans (they used to be passive…no longer for a CPU).
Not all fans are created equal. It is possible, if you want, to replace the fan on the heat sink with a fan that is more quiet one. Hard to say if it’d be worth it but something you might explore.
Again, it is all about moving cold air in and hot air out. Most cases should have a place for an exhaust fan close to the CPU heat sink. It is a good idea to have one there at least (fans can be flipped over so they can be an intake or exhaust fan so something to note when installing).
Then consider intake fans to bring cold air into the case faster. Most cases have places for those too.
You will need to check your case to see where fans can go and what sizes it will take.
PCI slot fan is ok in a pinch but case fans are what you really want. Perhaps the PCI slot fan, if near your video card, will help grab some of that hot air and get it out of the case. I am not a big fan of PCI slot fans but I have used them. Found it to be a bit noisy but maybe things have changed.
The choice of thermal compound doesn’t really matter. Anything from a major name – Arctic Cooling, Noctua, Thermalright, Turiq, Cooler Master – is going to work fine. Just get whatever is cheapest. If your system is overheating at stock speed, having the best thermal compound isn’t going to make the different.
Oh god do I second this bit of advice. (I have a dual core PC and it had those stupid push pins and they never really held the heat sink down properly. Everytime I’d just move my PC I had a fairly largely chance of one of them popping loose.) Oh, you might want to get the non-conducting grease. (I used Tuniq TX-2 on my current PC with a screw down heat sink. That works fine and won’t pop loose like the intel one.)
Again, entirely dependent on your case configuration, though generally true for most workstations (not always true for HTPCs, almost never true for servers or heavy workstations)
I have multiple 4diex6core servers running 90% loads with heatsinks applied with cheap-ass off-brand white generic thermal paste, so I don’t even think the major name is necessary.
The heat sink that came with the original machine is a large screw down heat sink. It worked fine for years until the motherboard died for reasons unknown. The only issue is that I installed the new mother board without any thermal compound between the sink and the CPU. The sink and accompanying fan are fine.
