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Sunday, August 10, 2014

Sent back the Silverstone HE01 cooler

HE01

A few days ago I bought the Silverstone Heligon HE-01 cooler to replace the Antec  Kuhler  620 closed-loop water cooling unit that I had it my rig temporarily. The cooler performed well at first, but then its fan went bad. I ordered a replacement for the cooler. That fan worked fine. Or at least, it could run at full 2000RPM as advertised.

But as this is a PWM fan, the motherboard would change the fan speed with respect to the CPU temps. I kept it at "Standard" fan speed profile in Asus UEFI. When the CPU wasn't stressed, it was reasonably quiet but still nowhere as quiet as I would have liked. Then I had to think about the CPU temps too. My 4790K CPU would run extremely hot even while doing a not-so-extreme h.264 transcode.

After I bought the cooler, the PC underwent a significant change. I got a new case for the PC and it was substantially smaller than the old case which allowed me to move it to the top of the desk. While the fan noise was OK when the case was located under the desk, it was intolerable  once moved into the new location. This made me lower the fan speed setting to "Silent" profile for the day to day tasks. Now the fan speed would have a wider range of speeds. It would still reach full speed if the temps exceeded 75C (there is no way to override this behaviour) and now there was a bigger chance of that happening because the low fan speed causes temps to be reasonably high even at low loads.

But the biggest thing that I noticed was how the cooler would vibrate when the CPU fan speed fluctuated. The noise fluctuation itself was intolerable and this vibration made it more of a horrible experience. I felt like I made a bad decision about the cooler. Remember, there were also some clearance issues with the GPU as well.

However, things weren't that bad. I still had until 23rd of August to send back the cooler for a full refund, because of a defect in the product. Awesome, right? So I quickly demanded a return. It was approved and all I had to do was to pack it up and send back to Amazon using the shipping address and RMA code that they provided.

That means, fun times are still not over. I need to buy a new CPU cooler.

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