OC queries for my rig

[Banzai_Joe]

Last night i OC'd my rig (See sig) from stock levels to 3GHz and ran Orthos for 10 hours with no errors and the cpu temps reaching 64° max on stock cooler, which i'm rather happy about.

Now, i'm thinking of the next level.
Questions:

1. I have a spare brand new freezer pro 7 that i could use to maybe bring the cpu temp down and allow me to push for 3.2/3.4GHz. Is it worth using arctic silver 5 thermite to help with temps as well?
2. Is it worth me adding a northbridge cooler?
3. One of my front case fans is noisy as hell, so i turned it off about a year ago. Are there any particular brands i could replace it with (it was the stock one supplied with the Lian Li case), so it can add extra air flow again, since i'm now an OC'ing freak!
4. Does overclocking affect hdd temps? If so, is it worth looking at a cooling solution for it. I only have one hdd in the rig.

I appreciate more fans will mean more noise, but tbh, its more of an experiment really. Once proven i can always look to reducing the noise with better quality fans or something.

GPU question

1. I want to overclock my 7900gs (256mb). Its the OCUK version. What the best software to use and would that need extra cooling as well, considering all the other overclocking i'm doing?

2. Whats the best realworld test to perform on games before and after an overclock to see the difference? FRAPS? or something like that?

Your help would be most appreciated, thanks

 

[Banzai_Joe]

Excellent, thanks for that. I'm wondering then if its the paste that makes the extra difference in lowering the temps.
I recently built a quad core rig, and without overclocking, i changed the stock cooler for the freezer pro 7 and..............it made 1° difference! Honestly, that was it, 1°.
It runs 50° at idle and 68° under load when 3d rendering.

 

[Banzai_Joe]

Pretty sure i've mounted it correctly as i've built dozens of rigs before and you usually 'know' when you've done something wrong. But in any case, i'll certainly check it over again and see.
Oh...and Prime95, i was told Orthos is better for stress testing, which is what i used on my rig at home for 10 hours (see my op)
Thanks for the tip.

PikkOn: yeah using Max to render (not me, i'm just the guy who sorts the I.T. out for the designers at work). Burning dvd's won't juice the cpu up as much as max will.