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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 have a problem with my 700 mhz webserver that lives under my bed. How do I shut that up? It's driving me nuts. I'm not trying to be funny here, I'm really starting to loose it over this thing.
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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.
The testers decided to set every fan to maximum. Unsurprisingly then, the biggest, gruntiest fan had the best cooling while being 'too loud'. The winning fans were basically the ones with a lower maximum.
I have a suggestion for the testers: Next time you're trying to compromise between noise and temperature, don't turn every fan on to maximum. Instead, decide a set temperature and measure noise levels when the CPU reaches that temperature.
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 know they talk about the weight of some of these behemoths, and they touch on how they are backed well (backing plates) but these things are huge, and put alot of stress on the Mainboard.
I have the Hyper 6, if I were to ever travel with my box I would take it off. Right now it is sitting comfortabley but driving, moving this thing might crack the mainboard around the CPU.
They should institute a "wiggle test" to see how much wiggling it takes to break the mainboard when one of these monsters is connected.
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.
Looking at the temperature graphs, I think the bigger message from the testing is that it isn't necessary to spend the extra cash on buying non-stock cooling. You can even get away with non-stock cooling if you're overclocking.
/noise in the computer is the video card, not the processor. Currently my AMD 3500+ (overclocked from 2.2->2.6ghz on stock cooling) is running at 37C while my gpu at non 3d is running at 57C and will approach 87C when using graphically intensive applications. Typically gpu coolers are built thinly...so in order to make up for the smaller room to work with cooling wise, the fans are run at very high rpm. This also makes the video card the noisiest thing in the machine.
Rather than spending cash on changing the stock cooling, consumers would be better off spending that $50 on getting better ventilation for their case since recently, the biggest producer of heat
By the way, if you're looking for a good place for help on building a computer, I find that the steam hardware forums are the best place to get help.
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In TFA they say: the Sonic Tower shouldn't block access to anything on your motherboard. It's not always true, on a Tyan Tomcat mobo it will push against the VGA card, I had to bend it a bit so that it does not touch any contacts.
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.
How can they have real review of CPU coolers without a Zalman?
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http://www.zalman.co.kr/usa/product/view.asp?idx=
I haven't used this exact model, but I put their "CNPS7000" CPU cooler and their "VF700" Gfx card cooler in my PC. Combined with an Antec Phantom power supply and AcoustiPack case dampening material, acoustically it went from "this is really annoying" to "is this thing turned on?" (and is running a lot cooler, too)
The Zalman vf700 and vf900 series I believe will both fit your card and are GREAT coolers. I've got a 700 on my 7600GT at the moment, works great (over 10C drop in load temp) and its so quiet I don't even know its in there.
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I was looking for a good heatsink/fan for my dad's Intel P4 560 (he does some gaming) and I settled on the Scythe Ninja and a Nexus 120mm fan. The fan itself is extremely quiet (you can hardly hear it at all) and it keeps the CPU very cool; if I remember correctly, it was hovering around 50C during the stress tests.
A great site to check out, which I based my purchase on the reviews from, is SilentPC Review. It has a lot of in depth reviews and what not on cooling devices.
I know that some GeForce cards have hidden driver settings that let you adjust the speed of the fan if your hardware supports it. RivaTuner is such a tool that, among other things, will let you set the speed of your card's fan when apps are using 3D features and not. My "fancy" eVGA GeForce 6600GT can't set its own fan speed apparently, which is disappointing since it's the noisiest thing in my case.
I'm a regular visitor to Silent PC Review (SPCR) where they talk about CPU heatsinks at great length. Only one of the ones in this article (Thermaltake Sonic Tower) do I ever recall seeing mention of at SPCR. The noise levels they're talking about (~45 dBA) are just way over the top from my point of view - I'd be reluctant to consider anything over about 25 dBA, which is about 50-100 times quieter.
If you're a mad overclocker who plays FPS games with sound through your stereo system with volume on 11, this is a useful review. If you want quiet, go to SPCR.
I use a Scythe Ninja passive (fanless) heatsink. Until about 10 days ago, I had a nearly inaudible, single fan system. (I upgraded my video card to be able to play Oblivion, and I'm waiting a few months for it to fail before I void warantee by replacing the active heatsink it came with.)
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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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