I love silent computers. IMO, loud PCs are PCs with bad build quality. Hence, I’ve removed most of the fans that used to reside in the case, and further have lowered the RPM of the fans below 1000RPM. Well, right now, the loudest fan in the PC is the PSU fan when I’m not gaming, which of course isn’t controlled by me. When gaming, fan on the video card ramps up its RPM, making its presence very noticeable. Scythe Kaze Master Ace fan controller is the hero of the show.
The CPU cooler (Zalman CNPS9900MAX-B) is very loud when the fans is running at full speed. The stock RPM is 1700RPM and that’s insanely loud. So much for CNPS title! CNPS stands for “Computer Noise Prevention System”.
The CNPS9900MAX-B is not the best cooler out there. (Check Tim Logan’s review)The Thermalright Silver Arrow, for example, is much better. But there were few reasons for choosing this cooler.
- It didn't intervene with absurdly tall RAM sinks on my Corsair Vengeance sticks. Finding a decent cooler that passed this criteria was very hard. But now I think that I should have removed those RAM sinks (apparently, you can do that quite easily.) and bought a bigger cooler back then.
- The cooling performance wasn't really bad. It was up there with the best air coolers, only 5C or so behind the best of the best. It was definitely in the 85th percentile.
- It looked nice. The fan was illuminated in blue. That’s what the letter B at the end means. And it didn't look overly large (but that was a misjudgment. It is a HUGE cooler, and unfortunately, most of it is air. The surface area of the cooler isn't THAT large.
So, the cooler is loud, and since I had the fan controller, I didn't really care about the noise back then. I have dropped the RPM of the fan to the point that the noise of it gets drowned under the ambient noise. That magic point lies just over 1000RPM. But at 1000RPM, the CPU temps increase by a little over 5C compared to 1700RPM. That’s not a big deal, if it was doing fine at 1700RPM in the first place. It does not!
