First PC complete! Thanks everyone!

[ddragon625]

I received the last of my PC components yesterday at 6pm, worked on it until 7 am today. After all that hard work, my PC is running as smoothly as I can hope for! Here's the specs of it:

E6600 dual core processor
P5W DH Deluxe motherboard (had to fight tooth and nails to get this one...)
2X1GB Corsair PC-6400 5-5-5-12 Ram
EVGA 7900GT N584 AR video card
Antec Sonata II Case
NEC DVD burner
WD 250 GB 7200 rpm hard drive
Lite-on $4.99 keyboard Works great!

Thanks for all of your support and advice, couldn't have done it without you (at least not without frying a couple motherboards first).


However, there is one final thing that's been bothering me:

According to PC Probe II (which I know is not very accurate) my CPU temperature started and stayed at around 43-44 C when I'm using the PC lightly (like surfing the web), which is great. However, my Motherboard temperature rose from 43 C to 49 C over a matter of 20 minutes and seems to be holding steady at that point during light usage.

I'm worried because during the installation I saw that the air duct system of the Sonata II case blocked a good portion of the rear fan (seems like a real bad idea... everything else about the case is pretty good though). I'm thinking this may be the reason why the motherboard isn't getting enough air flow to cool it down. So I'm afraid if I start using the PC for some heavy stuff like high-end gaming, the motherboard temperature may rise a lot more which can't be a good thing.

Should I be worrying about this? What are good motherboard and CPU temperatures to maintain for the P5W dh Deluxe and e6600 so as to not shorten their life-span? Anything I should do like buy more fans to put on the air duct (apparently you can add two more oprtional fans on the air duct)? Thanks for any suggestions or comments.

[blue60007]

Congrats!

I would try removing the duct and compare temps to ones with the duct, and see if it makes a difference.

Also, on the copper heatsink of the chipset (between CPU and video card slot), it has a plastic covering on it. I would remove that...I think it's just there to keep the copper from smudging during shipment. I don't know if it makes a difference temperature wise (I removed it before even starting), but it might.