Have you thought about using a self contained liquid CPU cooler?
Their advantages are:
a) Replaces a big lump of metal that places a lot of stress on the middle of the motherboard with a small puck.
With normal heatsinks, I certainly wouldn’t want to jar the case too much or the heatsink might come loose or crack the motherboard. They are usually only braced at their very bottom with their centre of gravity (CoG) well away from their mounting, especially with tower cases where the CoG isn’t even over the mount points.
b) Takes the heat from the CPU directly to the outside, rather than having one or more fans on the CPU heatsink throwing heat into the case, which then needs another fan to draw it out of the case.
c) Self-contained and zero-maintenance, unlike the daisy-chain piping and reservoir needed for full integrated water-cooling solutions. With the latter, I always worry what would happen if a pipe came loose because of damage or improper fitting during assembly, let alone how one adds new components into an existing piping route!
d) Some, like the Zalman I bought, actually throw some cool air on components near to the rear-mounted fan/hat-exchanger block, so it cools the rear memory sockets and bridge chip on the Asus motherboard.
Some gamers have even bought separate ones for their graphics cards. Certainly, I could just take the fan off my new N750OC video card, and use a CPU cooler, but it runs pretty cool as is.
