Yup. The stock coolers are ineffective garbage that only produce pitiful cooling effects with an insane amount of noise.

At only 30% fan speed the Thermalright Macho Rev. B I linked above keeps my i5 6600K at around 23°C (73°F) in idle and at 60% fan speed around 57°C (135°F) under load. So there is quite a lot of room for overclocking should I feel the need to do so. And in a closed case you won't even hear the fan with these speed settings.

Any noise it makes at full speed would be drowned out by the GPU cooling long before, anyway.

That's $50 well spent.

tl;dr
If you have the stock cooler, you need a better cooler.

This one was also on that page you sent, its huge and glowy, does it use liquid dark matter to sub thermalise the processor or something? I thought my heat sink was big!

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E0EXYDC

It seems to run on the power of tackiness...

Hahaha! (No shouldn't laugh, I have a backlit keyboard)

Btw. if you want to know what a really big heatsink is, look no further than the Noctua NH-D15...

Fecking hell! Why don't they balloon a couple of those up into the atmosphere to solve global warming?

Those water thingamatons, how easy are they to install?

Hi all! Since this thread seems hot right now I decided to ask here rather than opening a new one:

A friend of mine gifted me noctua nt-h1 thermal paste which seems almost full, but he used a bit for his CPU a couple of years back. So do you think its ok for me to use it now despite that on the specification page it says "storage time up to 3 years" I'm pretty sure those are past and since it's kinda open (I don't see a cap) do you think it's still ok for use?
It will be used on [url=http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K8/AMD-Athlon%20X2%204850e%20-%20ADH4850IAA5DO%20(ADH4850DOBOX).html]AMD Athlon 64 X2 4850e[/url] with heatsink and fan from [url=http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K8/AMD-Sempron%2064%203000%2B%20-%20SDA3000IAA3CN%20(SDA3000CNBOX).html]Sempron 3000[/url].

As per OP's question I think you should buy a new heatsink and fan since the power difference mechmouse pointed out in post #3.

Thermal paste should be good. I've got paste from 5 years ago that I still use.

You should squidge a little out, as long as its all uniform in colour and not seperated it should be good.

Damn that Athlon runs cool.

Only if it transformed into a graphics card would it be worth it.

They're not difficult per se, but a bit tedious. You have to install a pump, reservoir, and a radiator, then hook up the tubing to all of that as well as the heatsink/waterblock you get with the kit. Fairly straight forward but can be a pain in the ass, depending on your case. I just did it on a whim when I built this rig a few years ago, just to say I did it. I probably wouldn't go that route again, since I don't bother overclocking anymore.

I'm dirt poor, and my friend is the one buying the new chip for me, and since $400 is out of either of our price ranges, he's getting me a used one that doesn't come with a heatsink. Yeah, I know, a used chip is kinda a bad idea, but I need the performance boost and can't afford it any other way.

So all I've got is the stock cooler that came with my original i3. Nope, not over clocking. 3.4 GHz with 8 logical cores is good enough for me. Oh yeah. I've got some Arctic Silver sitting here, waiting for this baby.
Absolutely. Especially since just to be able to afford it, I had to get it used. Just over $10 used? SNAG!!!

Thanks for pointing that out.

Nought wrong with using old chips. I've got machines running on 10 year old parts.

Yup, a CPU is probably the last part of a PC to give out. They will last decades upon decades...