Hi, I rencently bought a Creative 'X-Fi" sound card for making my Camtasia (live screen animations), voice instruction, Vue video tutorials. I like it and it saved me the cost of a new microphone with a higher output signal (my old cheap mics work great now).

Seems to me your best hope is if the fan is the type that mounts in a PCI slot. If so, you could probably remove it and add a fan elsehere.

But if it was that easy, you likely would have already thought of that.

My experience as a PC consultant dealing with some overheating motherboards, is that a fan mounted such that it blow INTO the case, and located to blow directly onto the hotest motherboard area is the most effective.

You can buy fans that go into the 5 1/4" drive bay openings as well (if your 2 DVD drives leave any open bays).

There are some pretty ingenious fan solutions out there, so do some web research. Antec and Adaptec market several.

If what is in your way is a fan DUCT, you might be able to hack into that and re-direct it somewhat.

Another idea would be to shop for audio cards based on size and buy the smallest - if that would let you squeeze it in.

A water cooling solution is probably too expensive and too hard to fit into a Gateway.

HTH

_ jc...'Art Head Start' e-book
.......'Art Head Start.com site Digital Art skills. Free lighting chapter, tutes, Vue models, tex pix.