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I just got a refurbished P5N-D to replace my failed P5N-SLI. On my SLI board, my chip (via CoreTemp) was giving temp readings of 80 recently to 95 last summer.

In any case, about a month ago, it failed completely. Due to my CPU chip (E6600) not being compatible with the SLI board from the first revision, my lack of access to a lesser chip, as well as the possibility that I might want to upgrade to a Q-series chip or a E8300 or something of that nature, I decided to go with a P5N-D board this go-around (about the only other sock 775 board that has a PATA port).

In any case, the northbridge heatsink fan that came with the computer has a "warning" that says that it should only be used in conjunction with water cooling or passive cooling, and should not be used when you have a fan attached to the main processor, or at least that was my interpretation. Therefore, this seems quite useless to me, as the main point is to keep the CPU cool. Also, it asks me to connect it to the case 1 fan port on the motherboard, which is already occupied by a fan that's going to the outside of the case (I'd think that would be a really bad one to disconnect). As it sounds like a royal pain to replace the stock heatsink with another cooling method and I'm a novice to toying with my motherboard (I've mostly just exchanged hard drives and RAM before), do you have any guidance to offer that's a) not complicated and b) cheap to do.

Almost forgot to mention: I used CoreTemp last night again, and it was still saying that I was running 85 degrees after only about 20 minutes of usage. I'm running BOINC processes, so my processors are pegged at 100%, but still that seems extreme.... Then again, I don't know if Windows (XP) is properly reading this motherboard, as I didn't do a repair install of windows but just swapped the boards and deleted my infcache file to give me access to my keyboard and mouse. I installed a few driver, etc, files from ASUS last night prior to running CoreTemp, but I'm not sure if I did a reboot. When I touched my processor heatsink and northbridge heatsink, they seemed warm for sure, but at max 40 C.

Does this mean that CoreTemp is being inaccurate for the change of motherboard or did I do something wrong with my application of Arctic Silver5 (I used a razor blade to spread it in as thin a layer as I could see it coating everywhere after doing a pre-treatment and wipe-off).