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AMD Aircooling Round-Up of 2003
JMke writes: "If you want a silent AMD system you almost always have to get yourself a higher-class heatsink. Thermalright and other manufactures have brought out updated products that can keep your CPU cool while keeping the noise down, hardware geek site Madshrimps has published a roundup of the best heatsinks from 2003 that money can buy in 2004, read it here."
One thing I found to help keep it quite is to actually clean the dust off the fan blades.
It runs almost completely silent and keeps things impressively cool. Didn't have to buy special thermal grease, either. It's also compatible with Pentium 4's and the Athlon 64. It really is teh uber, and comes with a free fanmate to manually adjust fan speed. However, it is huge and doesn't fit on all motherboards, so buyer beware.
:edit: Site appears to be slowing/not responding :/edit:
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Conclusion
Let's look at the advantages and disadvantages of the reviewed products
Swiftech MCX462-V
(Provided by: Bacata)
PRO
Plug&Play installation
Easy attachment of both 80&90mm fans
Top end performance in both silent as loud categories
CON
Higher price
The MCX462-V is a true engineering beauty, combining functionality with top performance, the helicoid pin layout allows for very low noise production when using different types of fans. The full copper block provides excellent thermal conduction making overclocking possible even with very silent fans!
Thermalright SP-97
(Provided by: Thermalright)
PRO
1st class performance in all categories
Secure installation
Efficiency increases with the CPU overclock thanks to the heat pipes
CON
Installation requires motherboard removal
The successful formula from the SP-94 Intel heatsink has been brought over to the AMD side of town, and the performance is stunting, providing excellent results no matter what fan is used, it edges out the competition by a comfortable margin!
Thermalright SLK947-U
(Provided by: Bacata)
PRO
Good overall performance
Secure installation
Competitively priced
CON
Installation requires motherboard removal
The "older" SLK947-U still delivers very respectable results, although its performance has been surpassed by the SP-97, it manages to provide the best performance/price ratio in this roundup. If you are on a budget but still want top end air-cooling for your AMD setup then look no further then the latest SLK from Thermalright!
Scythe Kamakaze
(Provided by: Bacata)
PRO
Includes a Fan + Rheobus
Decent performance
CON
Installation method far from perfect on all motherboards
I had a lot of installation issues with this heatsink but that was due to the socket/capacitor layout used by the board on which we did the test. The performance is average, edging out the old PAL8045 by a very small margin.
Evercool MAG-01 & CUF-715CA
(Provided by: Evercool)
PRO
Very easy installation
Decent performance
Silent 70mm fan included
Very competitively priced
CON
Not "strong" enough for overclocking your AMD
Both Evercool heatsink proved to be worthy replacements for the Stock AMD cooler, providing better cooling at lower noise levels while being priced at only ~20! My preference goes out to the MAG-01 as it can be installed on almost all popular Sockets out there from Intel & AMD. The copper/alu mix does have an impact on the performance when compared to the full copper CUF-715CA, but the difference is minimal.
Dan's Data has amazing heat sink reviews. Dan tests each heat sink with a heater simulating the Pentium or Athlon CPU. He publishes the R-theta values for each sink tested and has a very straightforward scientific view of the whole process.
The CPU fan is both more important and, generally, quieter than the power supply.
Not in my experience, usually the CPU fans are 60mm and higher RPM, whereas the power supply is generally larger with a slower RPM. To the first order RPM == noise...
These days there isn't much jeopardy to run a couple degrees hotter for several dB quieter operation. I know that Intel CPUs will throttle down if they get dangerously hot. Frankly I'd rather save my hearing and sanity than the CPU anyway.
One additional annoyance is that most motherboard manufacturers go to the added length of putting unnecessary fans on the board chipset as well. These tend to be small (40mm) and run at stupidly high speeds (6000+ RPM) given the amount of power dissipation they need to counter.
One system I have, a shuttle XPC, doubles up the task of case fan and CPU cooler. I pulled the fan off the board chipset, and also the graphics card (replaced the graphics one with a Zalman passive), pulled the 80mm 5000 RPM Sunon dustbuster fan off the CPU heatsink and replaced it with a 2500 RPM much quieter fan. Now it runs with a total of two fans, CPU and PS, much quieter even at full load. How is this possible without having the thing cook itself ?? simple by underclocking - running the FSB at 190MHz instead of 200MHz. Performance difference is incremental and it runs stable at full load (and its much much quieter).
Well my work desktop runs at around 60 decibels from ~2 feet away. Yes, that's loud. And it's an Intel P3 system from IBM. I want a new desktop PC purely because it's so damn loud... I don't actually need more CPU, memory, or disk.
My home PCs are all AMD, all with the stock fan/hs. The stock AMD fan/hs isn't incredibly noisy, but it certainly isn't the quietest thing out there. The loudest system is really quite bad -- but it's because of a very loud PS fan and several case fans. I'll eventually take some steps to quiet it down, because it is ungodly loud (at least to me).
If you really want to reduce system noise, then check out Silent PC Review. They do some real testing of sound levels and give some pretty solid advice on how to quiet PCs.
I like this site because it reviews all kinds of PC silencing stuff, not just heatsinks/fans. Seems to be modeled on the popular www.storagereview.com site.
Has reviews of...
DIY Systems
Prebuilt Systems
Cases & Damping
Power Supplies
Cooling
Fans & Controls
Storage
If you use linux, you can find out just how loud your hard drives are by typing "hdparm -y /dev/hda /dev/hdb (etc)" replacing hda/hdb with the appropriate device names of your hard drives. The -y will put them into standby mode, making them spin down. For me, this makes the difference between lots of noise and hardly any noise.
The moral of this story is: don't get sucked into the hype of silent cpu fans like I did... when there are possibly much louder components to work on.
Here is how I quieted down an athlonXP 1700 system to the point that I got driven nuts instead by the motor noise of my hard drives:
Power supply: antec TRUEpower 380w. This unit puts out plenty of nice clean power, and also has a dedicated 3.3v rail as opposed to being a fork from teh 5v rail. This just means it's a more robust unit. Also runs incredibly quiet.
CPU Fan: Zalman flower (I think 3500). This clip on unit has a bracket fan and a speed knob. I echewed the speed knob and replaced teh 92mm fan on the bracket with a 120mm enermax variable RPM fan, reason for this is further down.
VGA cooling: Zalman heatpipe cooler (something 80) This unit has NO fans, and uses a massive surface area to dissipate heat. It uses heatpipes to achieve efficient heat transfer to both heatsink elements on this cooler. This cooler works so well that the mere circulation effect from my 120mm fan was enough to keep a GeForce4 TI4400 running smoothly.
Motherboard cooling: I yanked the fan off my motherboard, that 120mm fan was more than enough to keep it cool due to it's proximity to the CPU socket, and how large that fan is.
The system overall was so quiet I turned it off on accident a few times becuase I wanted to turn it on, and couldn't hear it. The hard drive noise is only noticable at very short distances, but hard drive access will be very audible due to teh low noise floor, and I found it to be slightly bothersome.
Ultimately I moved to watercooling, to get quiet with more powerful components. I cannot reccomend watercooling to everyone however, since it still has many risks that even a skilled PC assembler may have trouble with.