Best Air Cooler?

H

halcyon

Gawd
Joined
Mar 20, 2003
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I'm putting together a SNB build, looking for suggestions on the best 3 air coolers money can buy. I'm putting the cooler on either a p8p67 pro or maximus iv, with all 4 ram slots populated with ripjaws x, so its important that the heatsink/fan does not interfere with the ram slots.

Its also important to me that the fan throttles up and down with the temperature, when I'm not doing much I expect silence.

Thanks!!

ps no water cooling suggestions please, I am very against pump noise, and have had it in the past.
 
halcyon said:
I'm putting together a SNB build, looking for suggestions on the best 3 air coolers money can buy. I'm putting the cooler on either a p8p67 pro or maximus iv, with all 4 ram slots populated with ripjaws x, so its important that the heatsink/fan does not interfere with the ram slots.

Its also important to me that the fan throttles up and down with the temperature, when I'm not doing much I expect silence.

Thanks!!

ps no water cooling suggestions please, I am very against pump noise, and have had it in the past.
Click to expand...

Im running water cooling right now. My fans are 10x louder if not more than that than my pump which is 100% noise free. Just FYI.
 
Do you think the Noctua is better than the Zerotherm? It seemed to get lower temps from [H]'s review
 
Zerotherm mounting mechanism is a huge pain in the ass. The Noctua NH-D14 you can move the fan so it clears the heatsink or mount them in the middle and back instead of front and middle.
 
I have a Zalman CNPS9900MAX, it got some pretty good reviews, fairly light at 750 grams and definitely DOES NOT interfer with RAM positions in any way.

running an sandybridge @1.38v with CPUI/O of 1.15v gets on avg 60c on the hottest core on full load in Prime95.
 
Check out the Thermalrite Silver Arrow. It performs very similar to the Noctua but has quieter fans.
 
I think I would definitely snag the Silver Arrow if I wasn't worried about that front fan interfering with my RAM.. as such I decided to snag the Zalman, thanks for the pointer, it looks fantastic and I've had great luck with Zalman in the past.
 
Modern pumps make very little to no noise, especially the Swiftech/Laing ones.

How about the Cooler Master V10? I wonder how that fares against the NH-D14. TEC cooler would be a huge drain on your power bill though, but of course, you can turn it on/off as needed. I think it is tall enough where it would not interfere with most RAM coolers, and it will cool the RAM (as the mounting is designed to hang over the RAM).
 
Looks like I may have been a bit hasty trying to get something to play with tonight, the Zalman looks to do a great job at cooling but some complaints about fan noise. I think I'll just figure out how to get the Silver Arrow into my case arrangement. One person mentioned the fan rested on the top of their ram's heatsink, anyone know if sustained vibrations from a fan touching the ram would have any negative effect on it?
 
I've simply moved fan-mounting upward to avoid ram issues, however my RAM is shallow, so I didn't have to do that for my setup.

Silver Arrow > NH-D14 (The Silver Arrow includes better fans) ---> Scythe GT fans are better still, but the TY-140 fans are plainly better than the Noctua fans included with the NH-D14 (about the same performance, but lower noise)

Good sales on these items at Directron (check hot deals forum for coupon) and CrazyPC (out of business sale)

I think a 5-heatpipe version of the Silver arrow using the tower-depth of the NH-D14 (because there's no need to fit a 38mm fan in the middle) would be KING, but oh well... I also liked the rear-socket heatsink employed by the IFX-14 - that dropped load temps another ~2C, but I don't think its mounting mechanism is compatible with any current setups... too bad.

Fortunately, SandyBridge setups don't seem to require the behemoth heatsinks that Nehalem 45nm did.

You could easily spend a bit less (saw some sales at about $50 for Ven-X, but note that the Silver Arrow includes good/quiet fans from the start) on:

- Thermalright Archon (However its price approaches that of the heatsinks above)
- Megahalems rev. B
- Venomous-X

Or one slight step down:

- Scythe Yasya (saw them at $35 - $40)

http://www.jab-tech.com/Prolimatech-Armageddon-140mm-CPU-heatsink-pr-4642.html - It's too bad THIS SALE ended... this would have been a good deal (nearly as good as Megahalems)
 
halcyon said:
Looks like I may have been a bit hasty trying to get something to play with tonight, the Zalman looks to do a great job at cooling but some complaints about fan noise. I think I'll just figure out how to get the Silver Arrow into my case arrangement. One person mentioned the fan rested on the top of their ram's heatsink, anyone know if sustained vibrations from a fan touching the ram would have any negative effect on it?
Click to expand...

The thing about the fan noise is that if you use the resistor cable, it will slow the RPM, and cuts noise by a significant amount but the cooling hit is minimal. Around 1C.

Personally I used my mobo software to cut the RPM from 1750RPM to 1500RPM, and there is basically about 1C difference at max load but it is significantly quieter.
 
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