Pardon me while I get my geek on:
It turns out that chip on a 3Ware AMCC LSI 9650SE RAID card under the heatsink is so for a reason. I don’t know what that chip does, but it gets awfully damn hot. The stock heatsink is only wahfer-thin, which is curious because it isn’t the tallest part of the card, and there is considerable room for a larger one.
For background, I took my card of my server and booted to my external hard drive while I think on the subject. Without the four Seagate Barracuda drives spinning the only things making noise are the power supply and an extremely quiet 120mm fan pointed at the video card. That card coincidentally is an ancient 32MB nVidia piece which I chose because it will do 1280×1024 in a PCI slot without a fan. (That is was 10 bucks on eBay was a benefit, too) The 2.5″ drive in my external enclosure is nearly silent, I can just barely hear it if I stop typing and listen very carefully indeed.
So at the moment I’m enjoying some nearly-silent computing. The only thing left is a fanless power supply, and those are all kinds of money. (If you’re wondering about the CPU, it is a Celeron 430 with a heatsink the size of a loaf of bread. It doesn’t need a fan at all.)
Anyway, the RAID card. The stock heatsink is about 0.030″ (oh fine, I’ll check… 0.0426″, I was halfway close) larger in width than a heatsink I purchased for a Pelletier cooler I was going to use for something else. As luck would have it, it is a matter of removing two rows of fins and presto, a big giant heatsink which looks like it belongs there. The next slot over is PCI-e x1 and I have nothing to go in it, so I don’t feel the need to trim the 1″+ fins on this heatsink to fit into the standard card spacing.
The thing I must consider is whether or not to trim the fins anyway. If I’m going to go to the trouble of using the bandsaw at work to pop off the extra fins, I might as well, no? It’ll be a bit of bother to clamp it to the guide, but I’m only making one.
Speaking of attaching this new heatsink, I suppose I could epoxy a heatsink-sized copper shim to the chip itself (which is maybe .75″ square) and pull the old thermal paste in the middle/thin seam of epoxy along the edges trick, that would work well enough and not add much thickness.
Much to do, I suppose. I can live without the RAID volume for a day or two, and anyway it turns out the external drive is pretty close for read speed. That tells me that the motherboard is the issue, but RAID 5 for me is more about reliability than gee-whiz read speeds.

