Come on Paal, you can do better than this.

You're probably right about the memtest, good thing to do with new memory.
But why should the cpu fan be always on? I've managed to get this huge clump of metal screwed on top of it (barely, stupid plastic clamps), which should be able to lead most of it's heat away. I've set it's speed to be adapted to the CPU temperature. And when I turned off the "fan not working" alert, I had no more alerts. For the interested people among you (everybody besides paal I guess), it's an Arctic Freezer pro 7.

I haven't tried to install civ4 yet, that has to wait until tomorrow because I'm really tired and I need to get some sleep. No pitboss for me today, unfortunately [cry]

OK, this from experience with a mobo about 2 years old.

Firstly the BIOS should be aware it has to do temp control. Secondly a driver might be needed to actually perform the temp control. Thirdly settings in XP (I know shit about Vista) should be set. Apart from that make sure something is measuring CPU temp and is sending it to the mobo, pure HW shit.

Last but not least a slowly revolving fan can do both a very good cooling job and be below a typical household noiselevel and imo that's what you should aim at.

If you've tried all of this and still doesn't work look for passive cooling of the graphics card and one or more Zalman fans for CPU and case cooling.

Shabbaman, a good temp tool that I use for my E6600 is Core Temp. Reads both cores. I also have speedfan which is also useful for checking the voltages on the various rails from your PSU as well as fan speed. If you're not having problems, you're probably ok.

I looked at buying an Artic Freezer Pro 7, ended up with a Thermaltake Big Typhoon cause I found it dirt cheap at a CompUSA that was going out of business. Right now, with both my CPU cores temp at ~32C, it's running at about 1450 RPM. Room temp is around 23-25C.