Athlon 64 Results - Heatsinks with Standard FanOur first results chart has the heatsinks paired with their retail fan at high speed, and at low speed if the system remained stable. The chart is split up in "noisier" >40dBA and "very quiet" <40dba parts.
If you’re after extreme air cooling and you don’t mind noise, then any product tested here will be great when paired with a very high speed fan like the 92mm Vantec Tornado we used on with the Thermalright XP-90C. Compared to the results with the low noise 92mm fan CPU temps drop 12°C;
If you don’t mind a little bit of noise, but don’t want to go all out, there are several out of the box solutions which allow you to fine tune the performance/noise balance, the Tuniq Tower 120, Scythe Katana CU and Zalman CNPS9700CU come with fan controllers which allow you to switch between high performance and silence.
If extremely silent computing is your goal you’ll be happy to see lots of products keeping the CPU below critical levels at low noise. Coolers like the Scythe Mine and Asus Silent Square come with their own fan and even at full speed they are quite silent and perform admirably. If you want to pair your heatsink with another fan, the big tower coolers make for a popular choice, Scythe Ninja/Infinity/Shogun and Noctua NHU-12 pack quite a punch.
Let’s see how they do when we use the same fan on those heatsinks which can fit them, this will level the playing field noise wise ->