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Passive cooling heat sink?

E

ebolamonkey3

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 2, 2008
Messages
1,237
Hey guys, I want to make a silent computer so I'm looking into passive cooling for the CPU, PSU, and GPU. The goal is to have all of these cooled passively and have only one or two case fans spinning lowly to move air through the system.

I think I'm going to go with a passive PSU from Seasonic (coming out w/ a 400w and a 460w one), so no problems there. A passively cooled 5750 or 5670 (either that or a normal one, I hear they're plenty quiet), so that's good to go. Only thing is I'm trying to look for a good heatsink to cool my CPU passively or using a very low rpm fan.

For the CPU I think I'm going to go with an Athlon II low power series. The 240e, 420e, and 615e are all 45w, so I figured that will be low enough to be cooled passively. I know these don't perform as well as a core i3, but w/ a 73w tdp, I don't think it'll be possible to run one passively even if I undervolt.

I've been looking at the Scythe Orochi, but that weight scares me, and the size may make it incompatible with my mobo or case. So do you guys have any suggestions what a good heatsink to use for passive cooling or with a very low rpm fan (like 500rpm)?

TL;DR: need a good heatsink for passive cooling or use w/ a 500rpm fan.
 
Scythe Ninja, Thermalright HR-01 Plus, or Xigmatek HDT-S1283 are all great performers at low fan RPMs.
 
scthe ninja and xig S1283 or s1284 should easily cool one of those processors passively.. or like jayp said.. put a really low rpm fan on one of those 3 or 4 HSF's and you shouldnt have a problem..
 
Thermalright just came out with the passive HR-02 which is a monster! Check that out.
 
Megahalems is another option, paired with a low speed fan. A low speed fan gives you a pretty big cooling boost unless your case has great airflow... in which case your case fans are probably making more noise than the CPU fan anyway :p
 
The HR-02 is just as heavy as the Scythe Orochi at 1100g 0_0;

It does look cooler though, and advertises to not bump into the ram slots, maybe I'll look into that. Just don't know if these things will kill my mobo.
 
ebolamonkey3 said:
The HR-02 is just as heavy as the Scythe Orochi at 1100g 0_0;

It does look cooler though, and advertises to not bump into the ram slots, maybe I'll look into that. Just don't know if these things will kill my mobo.
Click to expand...

Just get ones that use a backplate for mounting and you should be ok. Avoid push-pins.
 
Well all the Thermalright ones (especially the HR-02) should be bolt through right? Anyone know what system the Orochi uses? Seems like Scythe likes to use their little clip ons.
 
you dont need anything near that big to cool a athlon II 240e.. the dang thing shouldnt even break 50C at full load with the stock cooler and the fan turned off.. its not like hes trying to cool a 130w i7 920.. its a 45w dual core.. even the stupid aluminum block cooler that came with my x2 be-2350 ran passively at 1.38v and 3ghz which brought it to an 89w processor..
 
ebolamonkey3 said:
Really...? You can cool a 89w processor passively with the stock AMD heatsink?
Click to expand...


i did it.. i wouldnt recommend it unless you have decent cooling in your case but i have an xclios case with 2 250mm fans plus 2 120mm fans.. but thats just an example of how little cooling you need for a 45w chip.. but if you were to run it at full load 24/7 it wouldnt work.. but regular desktop use and having CNQ enabled it would.. since the processor would just sit at 800mhz 90% of the time..
 
Oh, I wanted to be sure that the CPU wouldn't overheat even under load, and since it's going to be a silent build it won't be in a case with a side fan like that Xclios you have.

Plus, now that I'm reading up on the HR-02, it seems that it can cool a 3.6ghz i7 920 w/ only the back case fan drawing air across it :)eek:), which should give me some more options in terms of the processors that I can use as well.
 
Yeah, early reviews are showing the HR-02 to be the new king in pretty much any performance category and not by any small margin.
 
With that cpu, you don't need a monster tower on it. Try out arctic cooling for quiter operation and cheaper prices.
 
I'm running an i5 750 at 3.8GHz at 1.26V, with Megahalems and a Noctua P12 at 770rpm its only 62C running prime95. Dropping to 550rpm, the temperatures rise a bit to 66C. Dropping down to 460rpm its getting to 68C. Dropping to 380rpm the temperatures rise to about 73C. Idle temp at 380rpm is about 44-45C (I dont have any power saving features on, it'd probably drop to under 35C at stock settings)

Temperatures measured in HWMonitor, Speedfan tells me the same temperature + about 2C higher. Fan speeds measured in both Speedfan and HWMonitor gives the same speed. I only ran it for about 5 minutes at each fan speed, over the coarse of a couple of hours it may rise higher.

Remember thats an i5 750 at 3.8GHz at full load

It is a coolish is day though, prolly, if you're in a warm room with a poorly ventilated case it'd be worse (my case is well ventilated but with case fans running at only about 700rpm).

If you dont care about gaming performance, definitely go passively cooled graphics card or maybe get an accelero twin turbo pro or similar. I've bought several GPUs that people said were quiet but disappionted me with noise.

PC noise annoys the hell out of me. When I'm trying to study the drone annoys me, and when watching movies on my PC I want the quiet parts to actually be quiet, not an annoying background drone.
 
honestly for a passive heatsink to work properly you need proper air movement in the case

I did one for a guy a while back, entire case was full of Yate loon 120 slow at 5 volt
 
With decent case airflow and a big enough heatsink (hr-02) you can "passively" cool up to a non-overclocked i7, on a low power cpu like you're talking about get one of the cheap 30 dollar heatpipe towers and call it a day. Using an artic cooling Freezer64 pro (that I got for like 23 bucks) I can run my 89 watt 3800x2 passively unless I artificially load the cpu to max, like with prime95. With a 45 watt cpu it won't break a sweat.
 
for the graphics card i did a arctic cooling accelero s1 witha pair of stock intel socket 775 fans @ 5 volt, silent and kept my 4850 super cool
 
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