CPU Cooler advice

[Lodgey]

Hey all,

Im looking for some advice into quality CPU cooler, im in the process of upgrading and have a artic freezer 7 currently, but having that fan on full sounds like a hairdryer. I have a fairly small budget of £50 (may beable to push £60)

My specs are:

Corsair HX520 PSU (soon to be HX750)
Q9550 E0 @2.8(stock at the moment)
Asus Rampage Formula
Corsair Dominator 8500 4GB (2x2GB)
Akasa Zen Case (soon to be HAF 932)
8800 GTS 320mb (soon to be GTX295)

i was looking at a few myself but unsure if the ones i choose will be good for a quad core and fit on the motherboard and into the case. (the fan on AF7 comes very close to the first RAM slot)

The Noctua NH-U12P had caught my eye and is top of my list, i was also tempted by the Megahalems but having to by a fan seperately seems abit odd to me.

Thank you all in advance and although i dont post much i really enjoy reading these forums and have learned a lot.

 

[StevenRaith]

NF-P12 fans from Noctua are good for CPUs, I had two on my Noctua cooler and they have a nice, um, acoustic shadow, or however you want to describe the noise they make. Certainly more pleasant at full whack than the AF7 that I also had. I bought a fenrir and haven't fitted it yet, but mounted the single PWM fan from it to the Noctua, highest temp I have seen @q6600 95w stock is 47/42deg on each pair of cores after about an hour of running concurrent Intel Burn Tests, or Prime, or anything I can throw at it when using the PWM fan.

With manual fan control, I set the fans to 'just above stall' speed and the load temp only went up to 50/45deg per pair. With the two Noctuas on full whack, the most I saw was 42deg, on any core. Haven't really OC'd it much as yet, but those figures ain't bad if you ask me

Using the PWM fan just now as I'm too lazy to manually adjust the fan speeds for when I fire upCrysis Warhead etc - PWM is nice for just leaving it as is.

Noctua, Fenrir and Meghelam all seem to be highly rated. I reckon the Noctua fans are worth keeping in mind for any of those though - I plan to test the NFP-12 on the Fenrir when I get round to installing it and doing a back to back comparison with the supplied fan, just to see what difference it makes.

The only thing I can say about fitting is that the Noctua fits into my Coolermaster 335 with a gnats wing of clearance. The Fenrir is slightly smaller so should fit my case too, but I don't know the exact clearance the cases you are looking at have -might be worth checking the manufacturers sites for clearance when a motherboard is installed to make sure.

 

[Lodgey]

Thanks for the info StevenRaith, i will have to have a look at the clearance with the board in, hopefully i can have a big cooler and keep the sidepanel fan on aswell, thanks again.

 

[daniel_bourton]

there are a lot of good coolers out there how far do you want to overclock the cpu as this makes a big difference to how much needed to be spent i would go for something like a coolermaster v8 as it also does 1366 and is amazing from reviews

 

[Lodgey]

Just been doing abit of research and seems the Megahalems is to big the motherboard and covers RAM slots I have some pictures of my AF7 and how close that is:

Hope you like the ghetto southbridge cooling (it seems to get very hot).

Im hoping to overclock to maybe 3.6 - 3.8 but would certainly be willing to try for 4.

Hadnt really looked at the v8 but will give it some research.