Hey news flash! I am not happy with the cooling performance of my CPU cooler. But you all know, I’m never happy with anything, but that’s me. Some people are hard to satisfy. (That can be bad for both parties though)
Anyways, I tried many fans to get better cooling performance out of this radiator. There is no going back for me. I’m stuck with water cooling. A quality air cooler performs much better than these clumsy closed-loop water coolers for the same price (or even less) but they are very big.
With a big air cooler,
1. I cannot have all 4 of my Corsair Vengeance RAM. They have tall RAM sinks. They don’t really do anything special, as I found out after buying them. They don’t overclock AT ALL.But hey, they were cheap.
2. The audio card on the top most PCI-E x1 slot. A good heatsink like the Thermalright Archon will most definitely hit the audio card.
3. They weight a ton. And all that weight is carried by the CPU socket. Eventually it might break the socket, if you move the case around. While the water cooler is as heavy as the air cooler, the heavy part, that is the radiator is fixed to the case so there is no problem like that.
Take a look at how big these air coolers are here. (They have images of the system after installing each of them. Yikes!)
I can of course buy a better water cooler such as this one’s elder brother, the Kuhler 920 or Corsair’s H80. Both of them have a fatter radiator. But to penetrate that fat radiator, you need some heavy duty fans. Result is, more noise. I cannot live with a noisy PC. I believe the noise is inversely proportional to the quality of the PC.
So what I did was, I tried to find the best fan combination for this cooler. This is what I found out, with the limited resources (fans) that I have. (and the crappy ones are going out the window anytime soon – figuratively speaking)
What you should look at is the “delta” field. With the current overclock and Vcore, the CPU running LinX (with AVX) with a 8GB of load gives the above results. Vcore as per CPU-Z when these readings were taken was 1.328~1.336V. Of course you won’t get the same results. It depends on the arrangement of the case fans and case itself.
Out of them, the Scythe KAMA Flow 2 turned out to be the fan with best noise to performance rating. I’m sticking with them. I’m throwing away the Blademasters (I have two and they are so loud, so if you think of having both of them run in a push-pull config at max blast, you have a big hearing issue.), keeping the stock fan because “why not?”, and giving the T.B.Silent fans for someone in the future.
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