I want to upgrade an old sempron le 1300 processor. I wanted to upgrade to a phenom 9600 quad core. Would I need to update my fan and/or heatsink? If so with what should I upgrade with?
If this is the cooler you have now (thx remixislandmusic), it is probably big enough for a 95W Phenom quad core. I thought you had a retail board with standard AMD retention bracket and cooler. The HP cooler above looks good enough to run bigger CPUs, and probably is since the old PC came with better CPUs as an option. Try the new CPU and see if you even need to upgrade the cooling. I'm betting not now.
That stock HP cooler is pretty substantial. It has a large heat sink and even a couple heat pipes. If the cooler sits in front of the case's front intake fan, it should be fine.