The £24 Zalman CNPS7000B-CU Super Flower Cooler was Mr Lee’s prescription. Fitting the cooler was pretty involved, but if you’re happy wielding a screwdriver around a PC, you shouldn’t have any problems.

The motherboard needed to be removed from the case, which involved removing all the drive connectors, existing fan and various cards. With the board free, following the supplied instructions was pretty easy, although different processors need to use different mounting blocks. Happily they are all supplied.

After removing the old and reapplying new thermal grease to the processor, the cooler was ready to install.

While the heatsink and fan weren’t in place, we removed the noisy fan mounted on the motherboard. Not all PCs have these, but ours did, and because it was a very small fan that span very quickly, it was very noisy.

Removing it was a simple matter of compressing the small plastic retaining clips on the back of the motherboard and disconnecting the fan power supply. In its place, another Zalman component was fitted.

The fan was cooling a chip that controls the transfer of information across the motherboard, known as the northbridge, and the £6 ZM-NB47J was the chosen heatsink.

Fitting the mountings was a bit fiddly and, again, new thermal grease had to be applied to the chip, but it clipped easily into place once the mountings were lined up. It looked nice but, crucially, removing a fan from the case meant it was going to be very quiet.

With that done, the CPU fan could be fitted. With mountings already in place, attaching the heatsink was a simple matter of popping two screws through the retaining clamp, but the weight of the cooler meant it was fiddlier than it sounds. Once tightened, the motherboard was ready to be reinstalled in the case.

In terms of actual fitting, installing the £29 Zalman VF900-CU graphics card cooler was harder than fitting the processor cooler. The instructions are vital for ensuring that the mounting pins are in the correct locations, but even when that’s done, the card needs to be flipped for the mountings to be secured on the back of the card.

After that, getting the eight self-adhesive heatsinks stuck to the memory chips takes a bit of concentration. The quietening result was miraculous.

Replacing the small, fast-moving fan of the standard cooler with the much larger, slower fan of the Zalman, combined with the huge heatsink, means the graphics card is reliable, but whisper-quiet.

Simpler fixes
Once that was all done, the simpler jobs remained. Fitting the hard disk into the Scythe Quiet Drive, for example, is pretty easy. Your £30 gets you a steel box lined with foam and an aluminium case within that.

By the time you’ve installed it, your hard disk will need a larger 5in drive bay rather than the smaller 3.5in one it was installed in previously.

Fitting the drive is simple nuts-and-bolts work, and it had a dramatic quieting effect on the hard disk, reducing the amount of whirring and graunching to the merest murmur. It also reduced the amount of buzzing from the case, presumably because there was less mechanical vibration being passed to the case.