PC Cooling

Among other things that I've been doing, I recently decided to make some upgrades to my PC with an emphasis on quieting things down.

I recently bought a Zalman CNPS7000A-AlCu CPU cooler. Does an excellent job, has a nice looking design for case modders out there. Only one thing. Doesn't work with all motherboards (they have a list of supported boards on the site) and must be bolted to the motherboard if you have an AMD Athlon CPU (hardware included). Includes a little gizmo (FAN MATE 1) to set the speed of the fan. In fact you can actually get the gizmos separately to control the speed of all of your 3 pin fans.

At any rate, it works and it's quiet. Only about $35 too, which isn't too bad considering that some of the CPU coolers out there now are like $50 and require an add on fan.

For all of you upscale PC owners with a LGA775 Intel chip, you will have to wait. Not very many choices out there yet for cooling the new Intel (Socket T) chips, unfortunately. Yet one more reason to hold off on getting one as long as you can.

The other products that I got to help keep my PC cool were 3 x 80mm case fans from SilenX. How quiet are they? I did mention that I have 3 in my case, yet my system sounds the same with or without them. They are that quiet. Having said that, I need 3 of them to do the same amount of cooling as just the 1 Sunon fan that I previously had been using. Then again, with the Sunon, my system sounded like a hair dryer, now I can actually hear sounds in multimedia (OK, I mean games) that I couldn't before.

Will eventually replace my 120mm side fan with one of the SilenX units as they are nice and quiet.

BTW there has been some clashing going on between Ahanix and SilenX about the brand name, to which all I can say is that I got my fans direct from the SilenX website, so cannot comment on the Silenx fans (which are not made by SilenX) sold by Ahanix.

Oh, I should also mention that SilenX doesn't actually make the fans, they buy fans from another source and then modify them.

Can't say that they are particularly cheap either at $12 each (a cheap Sunon is about $4 and a Panaflo can be had for as little as $6) but they are quiet and do seem to live up to the promise of a 20db 20cfm fan.