Good fans

[mrtristan]

I'm looking for a pair of good aftermarket fans. When I built my current system, I went with the retail box Athlon MPs, because they were only $5 more and came with fans. Whoo hoo.

Anyway, I've never been satisified with the cooling of these fans. I'm looking for better fans, because I want to try and do some mild overclocking, just for sh!ts and giggles.

I don't need any super water cooled type stuff. Quiet is good, though. I had a rod style heatsink with my old system and it was noisy as hell. I could hear the whine of the fan from the next room.

[Hardcoreruss]

Tapst do some good fans, not sure if you can get them in the US

[mujahid7ia]

CoolerMaster fans are cheap, and you can get with LEDs!

[Hardcoreruss]

26db though

[mujahid7ia]

26db though

Wait, all CM fans are 26dB??

Mine (2 blue LED) don't seem too loud, and I have an additional 2 fans in sytem.

[Hardcoreruss]

I get the majority of my gear from www.overclockers.co.uk and all the coolermaster fans on there are 25db (sorry not 26)

[Cobra]

hardcoreruss is right - www.overclockers.co.uk are THE place to get your cooling fans. They are a little more expensive than other suppliers but at least they ship it fast and are dead quick to sort out problems.

I like the CoolerMaster Aero 7 fans - they can spin slowly and still cool your CPU nicely, so they're nice and quiet. I also like the 3.5" bracket that allows the adjustment knob to go on the front of the PC - quieten it right down for word processing and power up the cooling for video encoding!

CobraDMX

[rallynavvie]

2000 MPs? I had a set of 1900 MPs in my box before the latest ones and carried over the cooling solution from those to my new CPUs. I'd highly suggest this combo for yours as long as you have the room for them.

Thermalright SK-7. I got mine at SidewinderComputers but they don't carry them anymore. Anything bigger and you may be bumping into the other heatsink. Advantage to these is you can mount up to 80mm fans on them for more airflow and less noise, not to mention they're all copper.

I think I just got Sunon 80mm ball-bearing fans for the heatsinks. Anything is better than those OEM fans, they make this whistling noise that drove me nuts. My cooling set-up may be just a little louder now but it isn't such a piercing noise like the OEM heatsink fans were Now it's more of a white-noise sound of air moving about.

[beamguy]

What you really want is a big heatsink, the more surface area for the air to flow over the better. After that just keeping the air flowing is good enough. I replaced my athlon fan with a special low speed fan to keep the noise level down, cut the airflow in half and only raised the CPU tempurature a few degrees at most. What really keeps the CPU temp down is keep the cover off the case!

Anyway, there used to be a manufacturer of a really large heatsink, but I have lost track of it. You will know it when you see it, and if there is room above your CPU to put it there you will have good results. Consider also adding a fan over your chipset if you do not already have one.

[rallynavvie]

What really keeps the CPU temp down is keep the cover off the case!

Oof, I wouldn't suggest that unless it's for short periods of time. FOD is far worse to your components than the slight increase in heat is.

[Ripper2860]

Here's my recommendation for effectiveness and sound. Not a monster-sized H/S, so no mounting issues ...

Vantec AeroFlow w/ TMD 70mm fan: http://www.overclockers.com/articles635/

[beamguy]

Yes - that looks good. Alot of surface area for the air to come in contact with the aluminum.

[gmatov]

Go to www.tomshardware.com and check out 50 some fan/CPU combos.

They will show you that some of the posts here are not to be trusted. For instance the 26 db claim, where toms tested the at 50+ db, and db are logarithmic.

Most of the fans mentioned here get low grades there.

Read some, lad, you will, maybe, get a better fan than an AMD endorsed model. Maybe not.

Cheers,

George

[beamguy]

With my AMD factory heat sink and my special low speed fan that you can barely tell is on my CPU temp is 45 degrees right now. I'm running an Athlon XP1700. Its kind of cool down here in the basement.

If you are interested in a fast computer that you can live with I would suggest buying the best heat sink that an overclocker can provide, Tom's Hardware guide is a good place for a start, then buy a good low speed CPU fan from www.quietpc.com or some other place. My fans are made by Sunon, and I bought them from an large electronics distributer. They had a $25 minimum order, so I bought three.

[rallynavvie]

I can't recall seeing an article on heatsinks on THG. I'll have to go digging. The combo I posted was what I have in my PC. The SK-7s have huge copper slugs for die contact and copper-plated fins that far exceed the size of OEM heatsinks. The advantage of being able to put any normal case fan up to 80mm in size allows you to choose just which fan you want to use. I chose the simple Sunons as they offered relatively high airflow with low noise (tested less than 35dB). You could also get some variable-speed fans if you wanted to go that route.

[beamguy]

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030404/index.html

[SLICK RICK]

DELETED

[mrtristan]

I'm going to go with these. They seem to be pretty quiet and got good reviews at toms and the customer reviews at newegg. I usually order my components from newegg so I'll add a couple of these to my order, when I set up my office with wireless networking.

I'll let you all know how well they work, after I get them installed and running for a few days. As it is, my cpus idle around 55°C and run at about 60+°C under full load. These temperatures are fine according to AMD, but I'd still like to get them down. After all, a cooler cpu is always better than a hotter one.

Thanks for the links.

[Ripper2860]

Ahhhhh,

But this one is so much nicer ...

http://www.newegg.com/app/Showimage.asp?image=35-103-141-03.JPG/35-103-141-02.JPG/35-103-141-01.JPG

[rallynavvie]

They didn't even test any Thermalrights at THG. That's disappointing because I think I have all those they tested beat for cooling power and noise. But it is fun to see peoples' eyes bug out when I take it to a LAN party and they see two big 80mm heatsink fans taking up a whole lotta space in my big case

mrtristan: I'm curious to see what temps your VRMs run on that board. If you have the hardware monitoring ability you may want to check on those. Mine are hard to heatsink so I just have them sitting in the open but they can get to some smokin' hot temps when running both CPUs at full load. Just curious how hot yours get.