oh man
the number and size of your heat sinks makes all the difference.....
if a cpu has a 2 inch x 2 inch surface to deflect units of heat (for example only, i am not using a specific heat measurement) it will deflect at a given speed.....
now lets say that speed is 100 units per minute....
now, imagine that the processor produces 450 units of heat per minute...
you need 450% or a surface area of nearly 5x4 inches....
well, a heat sink has that much more surface area, the way it is built it has more surface area folded up into a smaller space...
so if you had twice the cooling that you need, your system would be quite cool. but if you have half the cooling that you need, then it is going to overheat and lock up the moment the gain catches up with the loss.
in other words you need to bail the heat out as fast, or faster than it is pouring in...
if i had more than 8 megs on my video, i would be running a cooler of some sort... most of the good ones these days have heatsinks and fans on them. and some of the systems at
www.alienware.com have extra "sidekick" style graphics card coolers that live in the right spot in the tower....
so yes, they do make some difference.
~BoB~