Sent back the Silverstone HE01 cooler

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.

My Devil's Canyon chip runs really hot!

In the previous post I mentioned how I overclocked my new Devil's Canyon chip to 4.6GHz. Going from 4.5GHz to 4.6GHz was difficult and the settings are not even finalized yet. It requires further tuning.

Finding the settings that would make the CPU stable was one thing. Keeping the CPU cool while stress testing was another. My Antec Kuhler 620 was terrible at it. Even at the conservative settings that I used for 4.5GHz overclock, the core temps hit 90C once in a while. Devil's Canyon chips are supposed to run about 8C cooler than the original Haswell. I was stupid not to test the temps with my old CPU before the switch.

Plus, these temps were not observed while running something crazy like Prime 95 v28.5 or Linpack. The stress test that I used was OCCT 4.4. It is not a complete slouch at stressing CPUs as it, I believe, does heat up the CPU more than AIDA64 - the one originally recommended for Haswell. Still, this shouldn’t have happened.

There is no need to emphasise that there is a problem.

Assuming it was inadequate contact between the CPU and the water block, the water block was reseated once, which unfortunately made no difference. However, I'm not so confident in my application of the thermal paste. I felt there was too much paste the last time. This time it could be too little. There is no way to know without examining the foot print of the spread, but that means taking if off again. Time is something I don't have these days.

Before thinking about getting a better cooler, I think I should try reseating it one last time. Like I mentioned earlier, it could be simply my incapability to properly apply thermal paste. If the cooler has gone bad because it wasn't been used for 2 years, then there is no choice but to replace it. It wasn't a great cooler to begin with.

Finally found an online store in Japan which sells all the highend aircoolers

If you had been following my blog for a while, you should know that I am very unhappy about my current CPU cooler, the CNPS9900MAX. 

Here's why. This cooler doesn't cool my Intel Core i7 2600K which is overclocked to 4.5GHz (1.32V) adequately at full fan speed. It reaches over 80C when I stress test using Prime95. On top of that poor performance, the noise is intolerable at full speed of the fan. I am running it at a low RPM of 1000, I stead of the maximum of 1700RPM. This means the CPU runs even hotter. Of course I don't run stress tests all the time, and there is no reason to run it at all because in fixed to this overclock. But when I play games and transcode videos (eg: gameplay footages to upload to YouTube), the temps of the CPU reach 80C after a while. That is not good. 80C is fine for stress testing but it should not hit 70C while doing even the demanding day to day tasks. The only advantage of having this cooler is that it fits my case without any issues, especially with the monstrous and needless tall heat sinks of the Corsair Vengeance memory. 

So, I've been looking around for the good coolers that's available in Japan and I found that the only thing that is listed on kakaku.com which fitted my criteria was Thermalright Silver Arrow SB-E (and the Extreme version of it at a slightly higher price.) The difference was only the CFM of the fans and hence the noise. The extreme version is significantly louder than the original version. But it cools much better at that ridiculously high fan speed. I checked around if it at least fitted the case and people are saying it does, even though the max height of the cooler supported by the Raven RV03 case is 163mm and this cooler is 165mm tall. And, if I move the front fan to the back as a pull fan, I can fit it without removing the heat sinks on my memory. Win. 

I couldn't find the Noctua NH-D14 which is almost identical to the Silver Arrow but works better with high heat and the current king of the air coolers, the Phanteks PH-TC14PE on kakaku.com. Shame! The Phanteks doesn't fit y case because it reaches 170mm high, but the Noctua does. Noctua has better build quality, plus, it is easier to install than the Silver Arrow. The other option was to get a self contained water cooler like the H80i or H100i. But they only cool well with high fan speeds, and I won't be able to tolerate that a bit. I will definitely have to run the fans on those at lowest and that would undoubtedly cripple the performance. 

So I had come to the conclusion that the only option I had was the Silver Arrow until I just did a google search for the Phanteks. I came across a Japanese store called OLIO.SPEC. And guess what? They have the NH-D14 and many other cool gadgets including the highly praised Noctua fans. 

Here are the prices.

NH-D14: ¥9,980

Silver Arrow SB-E Extreme: ¥8,990

Phanteks PH-TC14PE: ¥12,900

Sure, the prices aren't cheap, but at least they are available if you want. So that's good. I'm sure there are more stores that don't get indexed up on kakaku.com. I should use google more than kakaku in the future. BTW, you can get a Silver Arrow SB-E Extreme for ¥8,563.