Fitting the mother of all CPU heatsinks into my PC

I decided to indulge myself and buy a copy of Guild Wars. Having followed with interest the increasingly popular online RPG phenomena. The games installed fine with no issues (I would've been annoyed, considering that the specification on my PC are well within the range stated by the publisher). I quickly created my online avatar (Jib Ra Al Tariq) and jumped into the game, looking forward to the online forays that lay ahead.

With 10-15 minutes of playing, my PC started to beep. The beeping was loud, intermittent and annoying. Being a bloke my natural instinct was to ignore the noise. I figured that sooner or later it would stop. What I didn't count on, was whilst in the middle of "leveling up" my character playing Guild Wars, the PC initiated the shutting down procedure and turned itself off!

Frustrating as that was, I was more concerned as to why my PC decided to konk out at the most inopportune moment. Being a resourceful kind of guy, I ploughed into as many techie based forums as I could find. My research led me to the conclusion that my PC was shutting itself, because the CPU as over heating. This was not good news!

I'd never had to change the heatsink on any of my previous builds, and again from what many poeple had posted. It was potentially a very tricky job. I could if I fucked up, ruin the motherboard and/or the CPU. Which would in essence mean a complete rehaul of my PC.

Facing this daunting task, I decided to visit more techie forums and see what types of heatsinks were out there and more importantly which ones were recommended. It didn't take me too long to narrow the choice down to the Zalman Orb and the Titan Vanessa L Type.

After much deliberation, I plumped for the TitanVanessa L Type. The Titan came out on tops in most of the reviews, and it was only slightly more dearer than the Zalman Orb. Placing the Titan wasn't a simple task, it involved removing the mainboard completely out of the ATX case - and I can tell you that on more than one occasion I thought "oh fuck!!". Especially when the screw driver slipped out of my hand and fell among the innards of my PC.

It took a couple of hours, but in the end I did it! Here's a pic of how the Titan fits into my case. As you can see it's a big fucker...



Once everything was tidied up and the PC re-booted. I started Guild Wars, and this time running Speedfan and Primer95 I could see that the temperature at idle fell to 23-25oC and 36-40oC at load. Not bad, a total of 20+ oC knocked off.