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Roundup of Eight Horizontal CPU Coolers
ThinSkin writes "ExtremeTech has done a roundup of eight sideways-gusting CPU coolers under fifty bucks to see if they can keep an overclocked Athlon FX-60 from welding itself to the motherboard. In addition to temperature testing, much emphasis was placed on noise reduction, which with some coolers can be improved by adjusting fan speed or even removing the fan from the cooler."
I used to have an Athlon 800 mhz. Between the cpu, case, and graphics card fans there were 7 fans keeping that sucker cool. My roommate would say that it sounded like a Jet starting up when I turned it on.
I switched from the my AMD supplied Sempron 2800+ (socket 754) cooler to the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro reviewed in the article. I found that Arctic cooler made an over 10 Celsius cooling difference compared to the stock AMD cooler. I guess AMD includes much beefier coolers with their higher end CPUs?
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I do have a few Xeon-based workstations that are "side cooling" or whatever, their ages are something like 4-5 years now, the systems were designed to work with chips running up to 2.8GHz. It's ducted too, so the air goes straight out the case, and the entire system is surprisingly quiet. It doesn't have fancy liquid cooling, heat pipes or anything special other than an ordinary aluminum heat sink and a fan.
Come to think of it, I have an old Alpha that uses side cooling, draws in fresh air from the front, that was made in 1997. I guess the "enthusiast" market is just behind the times.
I found that the rubber gaskets used to mount hard drives in some cases are woefully inadequate in insulating the case from hard drive vibration. I took my Raptor out of the bay and simply glued it to an inch-thick piece of high density foam on the floor of the case. Now head movement is virtually inaudible with the case closed.
In the end, watercooling everything including the powersupply has been my only fully successful solution in silencing a PC overclocked about 20%. Removing all fans, trading for a single centrifulal blower, simplifies the issues of silencing by moving it to just one point, and building a silencer around the blower and water pump is not difficult.
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For example I noticed they didn't like the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro. That supprised me, since I have the Pentium D version of the same thing and I think it's great. Why didn't they like it? Well it didn't cool as well as others... Right, see it's designed to be silent, but cool well enough. On my board, the BIOS decided that 50 degrees is the temperature at which the processor ought to operate (can alter that but I haven't). If the processor gets hotter than that, it speeds up the fan, if it drops much below that, it slows it down.
Well the net effect is I can't hear my CPU fan. When my cores are mostly idle like web surfing, it runs at like 800RPM and is totally inaudible over other noise. During intense work it spins up to like 1500RPM and you can hear it, but just barely. When told to run to maximum (something like 300RPM, don't remember) it gets to be moderatly noisy, though not annoying.
The point is that no, it doens't keep my processor ultra cool, but I've seen no reason as to why I should care. CPUs can run quite hot with no problems. What it does do is maintian my processor at a safe temperature with a minimum amount of noise. To me, that is golden.
Also something to note is that often the biggest, baddest heatsinks aren't safe. They are too heavy and can crack the motherboard. Won't happen right away, but there's maximum stresses you are supposed to put on them. It's like 500g in Intel's case. So if you buy some massive copper job that weighs a kilogram, don't be supprised if your board cracks a few months down the road.
Here's what to do with zero budget. If you have a good size heatsink and decent airflow in your case, you can undervolt your CPU and case fans to slow them down. Just rewire the molex connectors for 7V and you're good to go. Just check your temps afterwards with lm-sensors in Linux or Speedfan in Windows.
It is the simplest way to get a PC to queit down. Put it 2 doors away (old fashioned thick doors not the modern crap) and enjoy the total silence. Oh and the healthy walks to change the cd.
Cooling a PC requires a couple of things. Getting cool air in and getting the hot air out while keeping dust down. The easiest way of doing this is to just turn your PC into a windtunnel. That is never going to happen with a nice looking tiny case. My solution? Rip of the sidewalls and replace them with a frame carrying LARGE and THICK fans (powered by a seperate powersupply) wich suck the air away from the mother board forcing fresh air in from the sides and back.
So the place where some case modders put a transparant window to show off the insides is for me a wall of fans.
Now that keeps everything cool. The noise? Well because of the huge amount of air being moved all over the place the fans themselves don't need to turn all that fast and I can use proper large fans wich are always more silent.
It still makes noise but once I close the door to the closet and then the door to the hallway the noise level is completly down. In the hallway itself you hear a slight hum but still less then from the central heating system.
If you absolutly need your PC in the room with you then you might want to look at some real water cooling. Not the sissy stuff with the radiator on top of your PC. Get that sucker out of the window just like in a proper airco setup.
Just remember that just because the critical components are water cooled doesn't mean you can turn off al the case fans. If you do that you will soon learn all the parts of your computer are prone to overheating.
The best way to reduce noise is distance. With digital connections you can either put distance between you and your noisy computer or use water cooling to at least get distance between you and the cooling setup.
The difference is truly amazing. Silent computing can't be underestimated.
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