Recommend me a cheap Skt2011 compatible cooler, able to handle some OC

Alexrose1uk

Alexrose1uk

Alexrose1uk

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Hey guys,

Currently building a 'blast from the past' socket 2011 build, based around a 5930K/X99 platform, as a cheap upgrade unit planned for a friend (Mike, if you read this - thank you!).

Given the socket is now relatively old; albeit still capable (it's not that far behind a Ryzen 2600/3600 in games or productivity, just more power hungry), I have noticed a lot of newer coolers no longer support the socket out the box. Not really surprising given the age.

I am trying to keep my investment in this build reasonable, so I have already semi settled on a BitFenix Nova Mesh SE case, which seems pretty reasonable for the price ~£35, however where I am struggling a little more is the cooler (and PSU); especially as many of the cheap coolers do not seem to support the platform, and many others, like the Hyper 212 have gone up in price in recent months.

My fallback option was the Coolermaster MasterLiquid Lite 240 AIO at £57, which I figure might have enough gumph to handle the unit being set up with an overclock of 4.2-4.5GHz, as a more or less fire and forget solution; however realistically that's more than I had wanted to spend on the cooling for the build, and many of the cooling suggestions I can find from back when this platform was more active are no longer available, or have been replaced.

I keep also hearing that the Hyper 212, at £33, whilst popular is not really all that great any more, and probably wouldn't have the headroom to cool such a chunky CPU with a half decent OC.

Anyone got any good suggestions that straddles a nice price:performance line, which some decent cooling, but at a more budget friendly price point?

I figure this is a good place to ask as I remember the 5930K being pretty popular here during the day; so a good few of you may well have very direct experience with the chip :)
 
Whilst the X99 may have been popular at one point, I'm afraid most (even here) likely have migrated off to other systems now. I have the predecesor setup; 4930k and X79 and tried asking about BIOS and other settings that are common between the X99 and X79 but most have lost the knowledge on them now, and that was 3 years ago when I began looking into extending the life of my system after the GPU died.

The only meagre information I can offer is, that you need to undervolt that CPU as much as possible if you want any chance of a cheap cooler to keep that thing under control when it's overclocked between the 4.2ghz and 4.5ghz region unless if you're OK with a cooler going full tilt and making a racket.

I've had success with the original Corsair H100 and H100i (2011 and 2012 version respectively, 240mm AIOs, so your 240 there should be fine) for keeping this chip at 4.3ghz well under control, but of course their fans were terrible and noisey. I then migrated to air cooling and went with Noctua U12A, that's not for you clearly as that's going the wrong way for the price range. But my X79 was the Asus Rampage IV Extreme, so had 8 DIMM slots (that were populated), so I needed a cooler that guaranteed RAM compatibility whilst being able to soak more temps from the CPU (as I was after silence, over temps) AND didn't overhang the top PCIe slot (which back then was designed to be the very top slot). But even with these higher end coolers, if I didn't undervolt the CPU (and use low power states; automatic underclocking) they would generate enough heat to be troublesome when overclocked to 4.3Ghz+ (75C+, vs the ~65C I have them at now). So again, undervolting is key here for a lower end cooler as the X99 and 5930k generated more heat than my setup does when I looked into things a while back.

Finally, you also want to find some extra cooling for the VRM on the motherboard too if overclocking high. A fan in its general direction should be fine. As I remember reading that a lot of X99 motherboards had the same (if not worse) VRM issues that the X79 series did, especially if you leave it to automatically keep the VRM under thermal probe control (automatic from temps its at). So you should probably (for safety) budget a fan for that too.

It's not much useful info I'm afraid. But an alternative "cheap" cooler you may want to consider would be the Artic Cooling Freezer 34 series. It's nowhere near as refined as the U12A and the likelihood is you'll have lots of cut skin and scrapes after finishing mounting that thing (so glad I only need to mount it once), but if the price is viable in comparison to the rising price of a Hyper 212, then you could give that a look in too. (I have that in another system and performs well for my needs, it's a Z77 sytem with a 3570-nonk also undervolted and barely breaches 65C under prime at 4ghz with that cooler and its fans at 30%; 2 on Cooler, 2 Intake, 2 Exhaust, all Arctic P12s).

Let us know how you get on. Hopefully someone else is familiar with this setup and able to offer you more current advice with cheap coolers. As even my info is in the region of 3 years old now.
 
As said by @Meddling-Monk Without spending almost double it's difficult to find anything better than the Arctic Freezer 34 - It comes with a decent fan, but also ships with additional fittings to mount a second for push/pull, and also comes with a small amount of MX4 thermal paste, which is still pretty good in itself.

It's also on offer as well this week:
My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £29.69 (includes shipping: £8.70)​
​
 
OK that is great. Thank you for the tips.
I did manage to find a 240MM Frostflow AIO that would fit, and is on offer, and priced closer to the air cooling, so that is now on my radar as a higher priced option to save a few squidoons. I'll take a look at the Arctic as well.
I'm starting to err towards spending the money on the AIO as well, simply for noise/heat even if I leave it at stock, especially now the price is coming more into parity.

Thank you both for the advice.
 
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Hi Alex,

Glad you received it. This is what I use to use when it was part of my main setup. X something kraken (NzXT) 280mm, Noctua Dh15 and an EK predator AiO.

If we are looking to minimise cost see if you can pick up an used DH15. That was seriously good with it. So was the EK predator but they are old and I think discontinued. I also think I used the old DH14 as well when I first built but can't remember for sure.

Having said that A modern 280mm AiO should be able to cope especially if you run at stock. Now if you are going to overclock it that's when the heat goes up exponentially. I think at stock it is something like 1.2v but if you want to clock it higher the heat it produces goes way way up.

My first port of call would be firing it up to make sure everything is hunky dory. connect a power supply and short the pins out on the motherboard to fire it up. Just to make sure you can get into bios. then switch it off.

You should also notice there is a m.2 adaptor inside the box. Or you can run it naked. In those days it was the early days of NVME and it use to house it on the far right of the motherboard and just directly put the nvme drive into the slot. THings were way ghetto then. Keep me updated on how things turns out. Just so I can relive nostalgic moments with it.

Also I just read the subsequent posts and it did indeed run with stupidly hot VRMS but I undervolted them massively maybe I saved the profile in bios I don;t know but seeming it hasn;t been powered on for so long I have no idea if it still there. Also worth noting while it does run with hot VRMS it is nothing compared to MSI motherboards which pump stupid and extreme voltages through it VRM and by all accounts is still happening today let alone from a few years back.

Wait did you say you needed a PSU? why didn't you say buddy. I think I have a brand new Corsair AX860 downstaris somewhere. By that I mean I bought it from OCUK installed it once and then removed and replaced it with an identical AX860 but older which is still in one of my other PC's. Let me look and I will get in touch if I find it.
 
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Hey there
Thanks again!

I had planned to try and do a test fire in the next couple of days; I also saw that not only was the NVME-PCI-E adaptor in the box, so was the 'NVME cradle' is also in the box, that is apparently meant to be attached around the connector on the right hand side of the board to stabilise it, rather than it 'hanging free'. Would likely just put something a small 250/500GB on that. Nothing fancy at this point :) but would be faster than a SATA drive; and I suspect as it has NVME onboard; it can boot from it.
I have a Xeon Haswell in my personal rig, which responded well to undervolting, so I was also considering trying that out. I suspect if I can keep the voltages down, the heat should be more manageable, both on the VRMs and the CPU itself.

The Bitfenix Mesh/AIO combo would have essentially 4 total case fans (inc the rad fans) so that is a very tempting setup and would help move air over the VRMs :)

And yes, needing a PSU that is capable enough (the only things I have around are too low voltage for me to consider using them for any more than boot up), last thing I was going to do was turn round and ask you if you had a spare when you'd already been so generous!
 
There was a NVME cradle I don't even know what that is neither did I know there was one in there. As you can see I never even open that up. Do a test fire then proceed with the other bits. There is no point ordering parts for it, if it is a dead duck. Although I would suspect that the cpu and mem would be fine.
 
Well the good news is I was able to test this AM and get it briefly into BIOS before CPU over temp kicked in (I didnt have a heatsink that could fit her properly so had resorted to an older i5/i7 heatsink turned upside down to try and get SOME contact), so was hitting mid to high 80s just idle in bios.

At least we know it's booting.
 
Alexrose1uk said:
I did manage to find a 240MM Frostflow AIO that would fit, and is on offer, and priced closer to the air cooling, so that is now on my radar as a higher priced option to save a few squidoons. I'll take a look at the Arctic as well.
I'm starting to err towards spending the money on the AIO as well, simply for noise/heat even if I leave it at stock, especially now the price is coming more into parity.
Click to expand...
Those smallish and skinny 25mm radiators aren't great on surface area for continuous load heat dissipation.
At least compared to high end heatpipe coolers.
 
Yeah, aware they're not as good as the high end AIOs/Air coolers (Dropped the Coolermaster idea as apparently that has leak issues), ID Cooling uses an Aluminium rad which is a pain but as it's self contained, and so did the CM which has good performance ratings for the money, not sure how much of an issue it'll really be; but thinking the 240mm AIO may well still be better for sustained heat load than a more midrange air cooler like the Arctic Cooler 34.

Leaning towards either the 34 (or the 34 Esports for aslightly more as I will be buying after TWO has expired, and apparently the 34 Esports handles higher heat output a bit better, rated up to 200W so may allow a little OC on the 5930K) or spend the extra on the AIO. The reviews I found placed the 34 Esports (single fan) as decently better than the Hyper212, so as the Hyper 212 is more expensive than both, Arctic seems a good direction to go (and admittedly they've never let me down in the past when I used them in years gone by).
Arctic also tend to be fairly decent on noise.

If anyone else has any good suggestions, am all ears. Realistically not wanting to spend £50+ on this, but also realistically trying to bear in mind its a 150W HEDT chip, not a 50-100W consumer chip!

By the time I'm looking at £40-50 on an air cooler; I start to feel I should be looking at an AIO, if nothing else than for neatness in the case :)
 
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Saw a Hardware Canucks review which included the Arctic 34 Esports; and also the ID Cooling SE-224XT. Basically they were neck and neck, up until the Artic's fan couldn't ramp further; whereas the ID Cooling's fan could go faster and louder; and actually managed to knock another 4-5 degrees off the temps of a 150W load, albeit at the price of higher noise.

For a cooler costing around £25 that's damned impressive so I might go with that if I go with a cheap cooler; if I spend more I'll probably be looking at a Scythe Mugen Rev B, or the ID Cooling Frostflow X 240mm AIO; as it doesnt suffer with the leaking issues the Coolermaster does; and seems to perform about as well as any other single width AIO 240MM, only dependent on the performance and noise of the fans.

At £50 compared to some of the other same sized and similarly performing rads being about double that...

Choices choices...
 
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