First run:

Before powering up, let me introduce my system: since I often use my PC at night (like most of us  ), noise has become a priority, the less the better. For this reason, I’ve installed an Alpha Pal heat sink in combination with a Papst 8412 ngm pushing 34.1 cfm at a noise level of 26db and keeping my PIV 2.26 cool. Usually a ti4600 lightens up my night but for this occasion I used a kyro 4000xt which has a loud blue orb on it, due to overheating after some heavy gaming (+1 hour) with stock cooling. A Seagate Barracuda IV and some Corsair pc3200 ram together with a few pci cards make my PC into a full running system.

For testing the Exos, I ran Hotcpu with every option selected for an hour to be certain the CPU really got stressed to its maximum.

With this info out of the way, let's fire here up...

Hmmm, what is wrong here? It seems my system isn't powering up... Oh wait, I'll shut down the dryer & washer that is in the same room and both make quite some noise but normally doesn't prevent me from hearing the system running.

Indeed, the lack of noise is the first thing I noticed when powering up. My personal pc has quite some noisemakers in it: the gpu fan, one 120 mm case fan, two 80 mm case fans and the CPU fan off course. I did shut down the case fans before booting and since I installed a gpu water-jacket also the only fans spinning are the two power supply fans (changed by ultra silent Papst ones) and the three Koolance fans. In fact, there are still 5x 80 mm fans spinning at low speed but man, what a difference...

For this first test, I had everything running at stock speeds




As you can see in this diagram, the Exos takes temperatures to a lower level by quite a bit!