Alright, so I figured out that I'm getting a Papst 8412 fan on an Alpha PAL8045 heat sink for my AMD, which gets around the whole "snapped a plastic mounting tab off the cpu socket" problem I've been having. However:

I've taken the fan off my Geforce 3, as it was making an incredible racket. I haven't seen any issues yet playing non-3d games, but I'm afraid I'll fry it if I try out UT. Will it be ok if I just get a replacement mega-heatsink to go on there?

Also, I can't find a noise-indexed list of P3 fans anywhere; I'd prefer something that practically absorbs noise to go on my P3-733 server. Anyone?

Ok, I just tried a thirty minute bout of UT, and didn't experience any lockups or color corruption due to the GF3 fan being unplugged. Considering how dinky that thing was in the first place, it's probably no great loss.

Why not just use one of the thermaltake blue orbs? The retail package has all the mounting stuff, too-- pinholes or glue.

I'd rather not, as the thermaltake golden orb I have now is noiser than hell. That Papst thing is manufacturer-rated at 15db (35db over on Tom's Hardware, but it was still lower than almost everything else he looked at), so I ordered two of those with a 60 to 80mm convertor. We'll see how this works out; maybe I'll go back and get another if I have heat problems.

No, the blue orb is for a video card. It's tiny. The concept of noise coming from it.. hmm.