The computer that serves up this site, handles my mail and acts as my workstation at home is a fairly decent box – Athlon 64, 1 GB RAM and something approximating 300 GB of disk. Not too shabby as a personal server really.

Recently, the sound level from it has been irritating me, as it’s been loud enough to penetrate into my bedroom. I grew up with a computer in the room, and all of my college days I had at least 1 computer (often more) in the room when I was sleeping. This was a different kind of sound though, the sound of a fan that’s had too much dust to eat and is out to make my life painful. It was succeeding.

So, how to solve this problem? A Scythe Ninja of course! Oh, and some rubber mounts for the fans. I sourced all of the parts from Quiet PC (UK) – decent prices and very fast shipping.

The Scythe Ninja is not a small heatsink by any stretch of the imagination. At 110 x 110 x 150 mm, it occupies over 1.8 litres of space in my case, and at 665 grammes, it’s not the lightest of heatsinks. To give an idea of the size:

The heat pipes are quite impressive in their own way, as is the construction of the unit.

As can be seen, the stock heatsink (from MWave almost 2 years ago) is a lot smaller. It used to be fairly quiet, but the fan has been getting noisier and noisier. Cleaning with compressed air and the like has done nothing for it, hence the attempt with the Ninja. The cabling will get tidied up a bit while I’m at it, but unfortunately the cabling is long and the case is short.

After taking some reminder photos of the cable layout for the HD LED etc, I proceeded to disconnect everything, remove the hard drives, PCI cards and so on. Lifted the board out of the case and proceeded to remove the existing heat sink and retention bracket. The retention bracket was quite strange at first, and I was contemplating drilling the core of the plug out. There was no way to squeeze or expand the bottom of the clip, so flipping the board back over, I noticed that there was a small notch at the top of the plug.

I’ve got a set of small-head screwdrivers, and they proved to be quite useful when manipulating the plug. A small bit of pressure in the right direction, and up popped the plug.

Now the arrow head can be squeezed with a pair of long nose pliers, and the existing backing plate and retention frame removed.

The supplied backing plate was slightly scary at first, as I thought the black foam had to come off, which would have meant metal touching the soldered pins on the back of the motherboard. This isn’t the case, but a long tail of a cap or similar would possibly touch the metal framework of the X.

Once I worked out that the diagram said I had to put in the large bolt/screws, then put on the retention framework, and then use the thin and long screws to hold everything together, I was away. Getting the heatsink hooks to snap on was not an easy task, and I managed to bend one ‘ear’ of the top leaf. Nothing a quick bend back couldn’t fix, but getting the right pressure in place so the heatsink doesn’t slide about on the thermal grease or crack the CPU is tough when also trying to bend the clips into place. I managed in the end though.

The clearance on the capacitors and memory is rather close – installing memory after putting it back in the case is not something I’d recommend.

Finally, the board is back in the case, and I can proceed with hooking things back up. I don’t have a post install shot, but I did work out that I should have put the rear fan on the rubber mounts before putting the board back in. Oh well.

So far, the performance has been quite good. I did find that the CPU fan was only about 50% of my noise issue – the other 50% is the small fan on the NForce3 chipset, so I’ll be looking into cleaning / replacing that fan.