I bought a Quad for only $350 and sold my dual core 2.3 for $300. The owner said he bought it new and almost never used it because it was so loud. No leaks on the Delphi Single Pump system, but the fans were always going to max after a few minutes and istat showed CPU A Core 2 was running upwards of 195*f all the time while the rest were around 145*f.

Pulled the CPUs and found CPU A had only half coverage of thermal paste. After new Arctic Silver 5 paste they both run cool and stable.





A huge help in reducing noise and temperatures was to tweak the AppleFan.kext file with a plist editor.

/System/Library/Extensions/AppleFan.kext/Contents/Info.plist

Stock code has it set to start spooling up up at 135*f and max them out at 144*f with very small even speed steps between and a very long delay before they spool down.

I modified the code to spool up gradually 129*f-163* then ramp up to max quickly between 165*f-167*f. Slowdown delay was cut by 2/3 from 48 to 16.

These changes have made the fans behave far more civilized. They now spool up quietly to maintain 130*f at average loads and 165*f at 100%x4 load.