Is my motherboard dead? And upgrade advice needed :)

[Chris B]

If you have Smartfan (or whatever MSI calls it) enabled in the bios just wait till your cpu gets a bit hotter

I just fired up a couple games, and I se your point As soon as I start pushing the CPU a little the fan spins up... not so quiet now But while I'm playing it doesn't bother me.

The MSI board has a metal plate mounted on the back of the board, which the heatsink frame is screwed into. I've seen that a lot of the after market heatsinks come with plates/brackets for just this purpose. Since my board already has one does that spare me the trouble of taking the board out of the case once I decide to install a different heatsink?