These good quality memories normally come with their own integrated heat spreaders. It´s not supposed to use a special purpose cooler.
As for the heat sink, are you referring to the CPU cooler? If so, you may use the Intel stock cooler, but you´d be better off using a good quality cooler instead. Garo´s choice is great.
Extra (case) fans may or may not be needed. Get your system up and running and then put it to test for extended periods of time, at various clock frequencies (and obviously at 100% load). Take CPU temperature readings and if they remain within reasonable values (say up to 70º C) don´t worry about getting extra fans. You may wish to improve the ventilation in case the CPU is heating too much ; in that case install an extra case fan and see how it goes. But note, however, that, unless you are overclocking hard, an excessive CPU temperature is more likely to be caused by bad assemblage than by lack of an extra case fan . I´m not mentioning the very common cause of dust build-up on the coolers, as it will be a new setup.

Yes indeed lycorn. Feels a bit silly to spend 60% of the mobo price on the cooler. But my experience with the Intel push pins has been really bad and I've had one of those coolers break those plastic pins. I get quite a bit of dust in my HSFs so I need to clean them out regularly. the Noctua is expensive but keep in mind that it has two fans and each fan costs about 15-20 Euro to purchase stand alone. It is very highly rated by silentpcreview and I would gladly pay extra for the reduced noise. I have a Scythe S-Flex for my case fan as well.

I agree. I just mentioned the ratio cooler/mobo as a curiosity, it wasn´t by any means a hint that it was too expensive. Quality comes at a price, that´s for sure, and for heavy duty work it ´s a good idea to use a well proven HSF.

So the Cooler seems like a good idea but it says it comes with 2 fans.
I just looked at my case and the only current fan (and therefore the only hole in the case) is where the power supply is.

Does this make these extra fans unusable?

P.S. The front of the case is missing a CR/ROM cover so there is actually a space there ... albeit not for a fan but certainly for airflow.

The fans mentioned by garo are part of the cooler, they are not meant to be installed in the case. See the image attached.
If your case doesn´t allow for extra fans, and if you feel the need to improve cooling, even with a good HSF, you may run the computer with one or both side panels removed. It´s normally more efficient to have the case closed and some extra fan(s) installed, but if the case doesn´t allow that at all, try to open it.

I anticipate assembling two systems later this week; one is Athlon II X4 630 based, the other is an i5 750. I don't recall the motherboard models right now, but they were both Fry's combo specials ($130 and $245), so the motherboards will be one step above craptastic.

It will be interesting to compare with garo's build. I'll post benchmarks here (this weekend or before) when they are up and running.

If I remember I'll also post semi-accurate (Kill-a-watt meter) power consumption data.

Yaay! Everything has arrived and I will be setting it up tomorrow. I had a small heart attack for a second when I mistakenly thought that the Noctua is not compatible with the UD2.

Do people recommend overclocking with the BIOS (I've always done it that way) or using the Gigabyte EasyTune utility?

[quote=garo;195759]Do people recommend overclocking with the BIOS (I've always done it that way) or using the Gigabyte EasyTune utility?[/quote]

Personally, I have had better outcome doing the OC in the BIOS. EasyTune is darn easy, but it wouldn't give me consistently stable overclocks. I don't know if that was because of something I did, or if some of its "auto" features don't really adjust themselves automatically as they should. I have two different GB mobos, and have had bad luck with both using EasyTune. It wasn't like it did any damage or anything, it just didn't do as good of a job for OC.

I feel more confortable with the BIOS as well but was looking at an anandtech article and it seems easytune has matured as a product.

[QUOTE=garo;195759]Yaay! Everything has arrived and I will be setting it up tomorrow. I had a small heart attack for a second when I mistakenly thought that the Noctua is not compatible with the UD2.[/QUOTE]

Right behind you...order placed minutes ago.
Basically the same set up....that way if, as a rookie, I get stuck I have somewhere to whine for help :smile:

Athlon II 630 (2.8GHz) DDR2 800 vs. i5-750 (2.66GHz) DDR3 1333
Windows 7 x64, 4GB RAM
No overclocking; all timings are default value.

Quick benchmark comparison:
[code] [B]630[/B] [B]i5-750[/B]
1024K: 20.18 15.87
1280K: 25.16 20.04
1536K: 30.28 24.18
1792K: 36.76 29.31
2048K: 41.49 33.25
2560K: 55.64 44.26
3072K: 66.97 54.09
3584K: 80.70 65.56
4096K: 91.44 74.00
[/code]

As expected, the i5 is faster. The 630 is about as quick as my C2Q6600 at 2880MHz (960MHz DDR2) when running a single worker; the 630 scales better due to the C2Q's memory bottleneck.
The 630 performs a bit better than I expected. I thought the lack of L3 cache would have a more dramatic impact.

If anyone is interested, I'll post more details (MB, full bechmark results, etc.) tomorrow when I have time.

(The boxed HSF is used on both processors; they are both disappointingly noisy [buzzy].)