So, I was just playing some Far Cry this afternoon, when the fan in my PC started making an odd noise and the computer locked up.

I figure that it's down to overheating -- it's pretty warm in the UK this weekend -- we're getting about 28C here in London. So I thought I'd look into extra cooling for the PC.

Now, because it's a Shuttle case, my options are quite limited. I've done some googling and found some message boards where people discuss cutting holes in the case and putting other fans in.

I'm reluctant to do this, so I thought I'd ask some advice here. I suppose I could underclock the CPU (it's an Athlon XP 3200+), but I'll be buying Doom 3 when it comes out in the UK next week, so that's probably a non-starter.

One thing that's occurred to me is to see if there's some kind of cooling solution that fits in a 3.5" drive bay: just to pull air through -- I don't have a floppy disk installed.

Alternatively, has anyone had any success with PCI slot coolers? I don't know whether one will fit in the case: it's already a pretty tight fit with my Radeon 9800 Pro in the AGP slot.

Would swapping to a mobile or AMD64 CPU get me less heat without sacrificing the speed?

I'm limited in what I can do with CPU cooling, because these cases use heatpipes, rather than normal fans. Apparently, by cutting the back of the case and replacing the grille with an external one, I can get another 2C or so.

The factory fan is also a bit limited: it's BIOS controlled, but it only has two speeds: noisy and very noisy. What's a good place to look for automatic temperature-controlled fans to replace the factory one?

On my SB51G I took the PSU out and connected a standard ATX PSU externally using an extension cable. The PSU in the SB51 gets ungodly hot I don't know if the SN45G has the same problem.

Like this one Link

If you can figure out how to get one outside of Japan let me know I want one too

A mobile Athlon would help quite a bit. A coworker here has the same Shuttle with a mobile 2500+ that he has overlocked, and it's still running cooler then his stolen Shuttle with a normal Athlon CPU.

What CPU temperature is the BIOS set to for the fan speed up? This sounds like it may need to be lower. I've set mine quite low, and it only kicks in during games when I don't notice it anyhow due to the sound. Ant LAN I go to, I disable the fan control to keep it at 100%.

Also try out Speedfan. It offers a bit more control over the fan in the case, and could help.