Replacement fan for a screaming 680i mb chipset cooler?

[Supercharged_Z06]

I've got an eVGA 680i and am using the optional mb heatpipe/chipset clip-on fan that came with it. Well, this fan is fairly loud. It's quite a bit louder than my case fans (P180 tricools on medium) and my Zalman 9700 cpu fan. (It's higher in pitch and has a pronounced whine)

Has anyone experimented with an alternate solution? Perhaps a larger fan with a shroud or a muffin type blower? I've got my system overclocked so I think I need this fan - but would love to come up with something that makes less noise.

Cheers!
--Supercharged_Z06

 

[Finkus]

I found this fan unbearable at first but that's because the mobo enables Linkboost by default which is apparently marketing junk right now and gives negligible benefit. It does however auto-increases voltage across the chipset, overclocks it by 25% and pushes up the temperature. If you switch off Linkboost in the bios and drop the chipset fan speed down to 50% the sound is considerably better and I certainly didn't notice any change in performance.

I didn't see the point in an overclocked, hot chipset with a loud fan for no performance benefit and after reading around a bit it sounds like the PCI express bandwidth isn't being saturated in today's applications and so linkboost increasing it by 25% is doing nothing for you. It might be worth checking up on it or maybe someone technically savvy can shed more light on the subject. The general consensus though was that linkboost is better off than on at this point in time.

 

[Supercharged_Z06]

Thanks for the pointers Finkus! I turned off "Linkboost" and dropped the chipset fan to 60%. It completely eliminated the chipset fan noise/whine I was experiencing. Ran a few benchmarks and there's almost no difference in overall performance (<1%). Ran Orthos for a few hours and stability is still solid as well. Sweet!

Cheers!
--Supercharged_Z06

 

[Martyr]

I found this fan unbearable at first but that's because the mobo enables Linkboost by default which is apparently marketing junk right now and gives negligible benefit. It does however auto-increases voltage across the chipset, overclocks it by 25% and pushes up the temperature. If you switch off Linkboost in the bios and drop the chipset fan speed down to 50% the sound is considerably better and I certainly didn't notice any change in performance.

I didn't see the point in an overclocked, hot chipset with a loud fan for no performance benefit and after reading around a bit it sounds like the PCI express bandwidth isn't being saturated in today's applications and so linkboost increasing it by 25% is doing nothing for you. It might be worth checking up on it or maybe someone technically savvy can shed more light on the subject. The general consensus though was that linkboost is better off than on at this point in time.

is asus expecting some majorly high bandwidth cards in the future or something?