Best silent air cooler for the 4770k/Z87x-OC

The Noctua NH U14S was what I ended up going for after a fruitless Google search showed very littl in the way of Haswell cooling group tests.

Also seen the Truespirit 120 recommended for the budget oriented.
 
True Spirit 140 BW would be a good choice. You get very good performance to noise ratio and £34.99 is a very good price.

Another to consider is Alpenfohn Matterhorn £29.99 but it's not as good as TS 140... about 3-4c warmer... the same as TS 120
 
you wanna buy the best cooler you can afford regarding haswell

top end coolers like the phanteks/k2 mount doom/silver arrow/noctua d14 if it were me

all those cooelrs are big so make sure you have good ram clearance and wide enough cases
 
doyll said:
Haswells are 84w chips. They don't need as much cooling as many other higher wattage chips do.
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Yes they do. When pushed they get very hot, as the heat transfer from die to heatspreader is pretty poor. You want the best possible cooling for Haswell really, when overclocking anyway.
 
Shiari said:
Yes they do. When pushed they get very hot, as the heat transfer from die to heatspreader is pretty poor. You want the best possible cooling for Haswell really, when overclocking anyway.
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I understand what you are saying. Just don't believe it makes much difference. The problem as you say is die to cover and not cover to cooler... so unless you delid the cpu will run hot regardless of cooler being capable of cooling 300watts to 60c (TC-14PE) or 62c (TS 140) or 64c (TS 120).

Cooler can only move the heat away if the chip's heat is transmitted to it through CPU cover/spreader. It's simple, the 2-4c difference in coolers is 2-4c difference in CPU temperature... maybe only 1-2c difference in CPU temps because the chip to cover transfer is the problem... in most systems that small difference isn't going to matter.
 
Yeah I get your point: the poor heat transfers will make the cooling less effective which means the difference of a "best" cooler vs a "good" cooler will be less than if the heat transfer was better.

But that still doesn't change that you really need to get all the heat out as well as you can when overclocking. A couple of degrees at most perhaps from a top end to a good cooler in theory won't matter all that much, but it can still make a difference in how far you can push it.
 
I got the Nocua NH-U14. A quality product that'll still be going strong ten years from now even when I've passed the PC on. They are narrow to give tall RAM clearance, and you need to make sure your case is wide enough, but the 140mm fan makes very little noise until you run a high load on the CPU, and then it speeds up (motherboard controlled fans everywhere).

Just make sure you have checked the compatibility information at the Noctua website. If you can't fit the U14, there is a smaller U12 that has a 120mm fan.
 
I used the same k2 cooler on my last three cpu's, (i7 920 @4.2ghz, 3570k @4.5ghz and current 3770k @4.5ghz. The coolest running chip of them all was the i7 920, naxing at 69c with the stock fans under ibt. 3570k hit a maximum of 76c, 82c on the 3770k. Will be using the same cooler again on an upcoming haswell i7 4770k build. The heat produced by theese latest chips is insane, and the i7 920 was supposed to be a hot running cpu.
 
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