Here's the deal. It's getting to be summer here in the U.S, and temperatures are in the mid to high 80's as of now. My computer is starting to sound like some kind of a vacuum cleaner (it's that loud). When I'm playing games (LFS, of course), it gets so hot that it starts to heat up the room that it's in. My computer's a 2004 Dell, 3.0 ghz Pentium 4 w/ HT, 128 Mb NVidia card, 512 Mb RAM, and an 80 Gb hard drive. I certainly can't afford to upgrade anything in it, so what can I do with what's there, or stuff that's lying around the house. As of now all I can think of is to lay ice packs around it . What can I do to improve its heat problem?

judging by the components you got there its probably rather old
so for starters opening it up and blowing some compressed air on all the coolers to clean them out would probably help a lot

I'm using an open case and a small table fan to get air circulating in there. Helps ALOT for me, and virtually silent. My harddrives make more noise than my fans, and my components develop a lot of heat ([email protected], 7900GTX SLI, a stack of harddrives and an Asus P5N mobo that runs hotter'n hell). My system runs at just over room temperature at idle, and about 10C over under heavy load.

Cleaning the fans is always a good idea.

Quote from Shotglass :

judging by the components you got there its probably rather old
so for starters opening it up and blowing some compressed air on all the coolers to clean them out would probably help a lot

good advice, just dont forget that you can screw all of the fans by doing this, you must jam them in place with your finger or make sure they dont rotate in the wrong direction.

yse software such as speedfan to see what temp the actual CPU is - it may be nothing to worry about - but if it is, the only way of getting a neglible temp drop is to clean the heatsink, apply new thermal paste or more likely buy a new fan (about £17)

if you can, put some fans in the case at the front and/or back to help fresh air flow through which should help the temp drop on everything. 120mm would be good but i think they are kinda exspensive. Its defintely worth spending a bit of money to have a quiet(er) computer.

Quote from Barroso :

good advice, just dont forget that you can screw all of the fans by doing this, you must jam them in place with your finger or make sure they dont rotate in the wrong direction.

electric motors especially brushless ones dont have a "wrong" direction so as long as you dont hit the blades right on with 6 bar and make the fan spin 10 times faster than it normally would youll be fine

Quote from wildwilly :

if you can, put some fans in the case at the front and/or back to help fresh air flow through which should help the temp drop on everything. 120mm would be good but i think they are kinda exspensive. Its defintely worth spending a bit of money to have a quiet(er) computer.

My 120mm fans were £2 each

nice quiet, high cfm fans that are 120 mm can set you back £10 quite easily (look at the Silenx fans)

Quote from Jakg :

nice quiet, high cfm fans that are 120 mm can set you back £10 quite easily (look at the Silenx fans)

bearing in mind the age of his system, i would imagine that the noise of the cheapo £2 120mm fans i got will not be noticed

Quote from BlackSheep720 :

Here's the deal. It's getting to be summer here in the U.S, and temperatures are in the mid to high 80's as of now. My computer is starting to sound like some kind of a vacuum cleaner (it's that loud). When I'm playing games (LFS, of course), it gets so hot that it starts to heat up the room that it's in. My computer's a 2004 Dell, 3.0 ghz Pentium 4 w/ HT, 128 Mb NVidia card, 512 Mb RAM, and an 80 Gb hard drive. I certainly can't afford to upgrade anything in it, so what can I do with what's there, or stuff that's lying around the house. As of now all I can think of is to lay ice packs around it . What can I do to improve its heat problem?

How do you know it's overheating? You neither mentioned the CPU temperature nor any stability problems. If your PC doesn't crash, it's not overheating, almost by definition.

If it's noise that's annoying you, open the case, find out which fan is noisy by stopping them from rotating with your finger and then replace the loudest with a better one.

Quote from Shotglass :

opening it up and blowing some compressed air on all the coolers to clean them out would probably help a lot

I can't recommend this enough! You can buy a can of compressed air for very little money. Its important that you check your computer for dust AT LEAST once a year. If you computer is standing on the floor, dust will build up much quicker than if its standing on your desk.

The fans in your computer can be damaged by dust. Luckily fans are inexpensive to replace. Clean out your computer case and find out which fans need replacing. Also note that you can buy quieter fans to replace the ones you are using now.

Theres a bit of dodgy advice in this thread.

Firstly I recommend Intel's Thermal Analysis Tool for acurate cpu temperature readings over SpeedFan.

Secondly SilenX fans aren't as nice as they make out. Its known that many of their noise figures were actually made up by themselves to sound better. Apparently this has stopped now, although some reviewers will prove otherwise. However thats not really relevant here.

Finally your cpu fan is temperature controlled, as you may know. The best advice is, as others have said, fully clean out the CPU heatsink and fan. Other than that there's not much additional you can do to a dell - those P4s run fairly hot, and as a result those particular Dell machines are pretty loud.

Quote from pb32000 :

Firstly I recommend Intel's Thermal Analysis Tool for acurate cpu temperature readings over SpeedFan.

Only works on C2D's...

Ahh ok. Bios is the next best then, but I cant remember if Dell lets you get at anything that way related

Quote from pb32000 :

Secondly SilenX fans aren't as nice as they make out.

The quietest 120mm fans I found were:

Nexus D12SL-12 (£12.00 inc. VAT)
Noctua NF-S12 (£12.91 inc. VAT)
Scythe S-FLEX (£12.91 inc. VAT)

Defiantely agree there Kev. The Noctua is meant to be one of the best 'silent' fans, as rated by silentpcreview.

Quote from pb32000 :

Ahh ok. Bios is the next best then, but I cant remember if Dell lets you get at anything that way related

Not much point in looking at temperatures without CPU load.