My new Ryzen 7900 system is great, except that with a Peerless Assassin cooler it gets a bit noisy under load. The sound is high pitched and whining, particularly annoying. I could live with the volume if it was white noise.
I could replace the fans with better ones, but would they make a decent improvement over the ones that came with it?
A couple of Noctua fans are the same price as the entire Peerless Assassin and its two bundled fans, so…
The other option is an AIO water cooler like the Arctic Liquid Freezer III 360. I have an ASUS AP201 case so it will just about fit in the top, just. Linus Tech Tips recently said that they didn’t think an AIO was worth it for low noise though.
Any suggestions? I suppose I could get Noctua fans and try them, if the result is no good then they would go on the AIO anyway.
It depends on your components, but it’s not that hard to build a quiet air cooled machine with the kind of whacking huge heatsinks and larger case fans we have these days. That’s probably what I’d look at first.
quilt, I have set the fan curve to only ramp up above 75C, which definitely helped reduce the frequency with which the annoying noise was introduced. Unfortunately for stuff like video encodes it doesn’t make much difference. I could lower the max fan speed, but those fans only seem to have two settings: quiet and annoying whine.
redocbew: I’m not sure how much further I can go on air. The Peerless Assassin is the best bar none. I could add more case fans I guess.
I agree, having used three different 240-280mm AIO coolers, from three different respected brands, in three different systems; I have not had good luck with them noise wise.
All three were installed properly (with the pump at the bottom of the loop), yet within six months each had developed a constant hum or whine which was much more intrusive than fan noise.
I would encourage you to try some Noctua fans, a silence-focused case, or an overall larger cooler.
I highly recommend carefully reading this article:
Gains going from a good air cooler to an AIO are very marginal. The same applies when going from moderate fan speeds to 100%
My recommendation is to set the fan to what you can bear, max temp to what you can tolerate, and see if you are happy with the performance. I have my nocturnal D15 at about 60% max and I‘ll still hit 95C but pushing 200+ W on the CPU. If I go to 100% I might push 250w and go from 5GHz to 5.1Ghz on some load. Not worth it. A really good AIO might get you another 50MHz and 50W. Deep in diminishing returns.
I run a threadripper 7970 with the Noctua cooler. I though a long time about going with a water cooler. And read a ton of articles plus watched all the troubles people had with water systems.
At the end i found out that there are still too many issues with these.
No matter what brand you use they all have had some shitstorms or issues in the past. Be it rubber gaskets dissolving debris into the cooling fluid, be it copper fins corroding and blocking passages, be it pump failures, pump noises, radiator burbles and so on. I see it like the guys from gamers nexus - the parts have improved a lot, and they are used by many without troubles. (also at GN) But at the end I’ve choosen the save route. Going with an aircooler… I do client work on this machine and cant afford to mess with failing parts.
Also standard! AIO systems are not even worth a thought about when it comes down to cooling perfomance.
You got to get a big setup to beat air cooling.
This article below verifies what Quilt Postet before.
Tbh i added quiet some case fans, they don’t really impact the cpu cooling that much. I understood now that it’s the heat sink and it’s fans that really do the heavy lifting. So the solution is to get a really good heatsink /aircooler.
See:
If it’s the whine from the fans that’s annoying you, definitely just replace the fans. You don’t have to go all the way to NF-A12x25s necessarily, although they’d be a safe bet. Could try a pair of NF-P12 Reduxs instead at under half the price, though they don’t quite hit the same airflow. The Phanteks T30s get decent reviews too, though they are thicker than a standard fan so I’m not sure one would fit in the middle fan spot on the Peerless Assassin.
In performance-per-dollar, sure. But thermal solutions are much more complicated than just Watts & degrees.
The Thermalright PA may be a third of the cost of D15 with similar stock performance, but I would suspect that the latter has a much better acoustic design on the cooler itself.
Next comes the fans; the newer TR fans are shockingly good performers for under $5 a fan, but you’re definitely giving up some noise quality for the savings. On that note, the stock A15s on the Noctua D15 are absolute garbage tier and perform no better than an A12x25 but with an annoying whine above 900rpm.
So ideally for the best noise AND performance, you’d want a D15, but plan to replace the fans with a pair of A12x25’s for a +60% increase in price on the already most expensive model. Better yet would be to message Noctua CS and wait three weeks for a set of 140mm fan clips to arrive so you can use the new A14x25 fans (if they ever come out).
Also keep in mind that the performance difference between a 280(x140) & 360(x120)mm radiator is less than 10% and 140mm fans are more efficient and quieter in general. Biggest difference in AIOs is radiator thickness and fin density. This also greatly affects the acoustic performance as well.
Hate with a passion water cooling and only use heatsink and fans. If something goes bad it’s a easy fix and no need to do any real maintenance except blowing out the dust or reapplying thermal
I’ve been using AIOs since Zen2 and have found them necessary to maximize the performance envelope of modern CPUs. If you are a “set it as stock, leave it alone” type of person water is probably not necessary. But temperatures do impact device longevity, especially these modern Auto-clocking designs. The Puget article listed above shows definite benefits to using water cooling for the use I describe.
Before AIOs I used a massive dual tower Phanteks and then D15. What was found after removal on an X58 board used for 6+ years, was these very large very heavy coolers can warp the motherboard. I do not like this.
I switched to water for both the temperatures, and trading the risk of leak/failure with the risk of physical deformation failure.
Plus, an AIO is just so much easier to work with. Big coolers are in the way and knick your hands.
Thanks everyone. It seems like getting the Noctua fans has to be the first step.
If I did get an AIO then I’d replace it after 5 years.
140mm fans could go in the bottom of the case. There is room for two, but due to cabling down there and I can probably only fit one. I have the 120 that came with the case, it’s surprisingly good.
Is there a way to validate installation of the cooler? I think I did it right, did an X of thermal paste with dots, the stuff that came with the PA. Tightened it down pretty hard.
You should consider other fans besides Noctuas. Between Thermaltake and Phanteks, Noctua doesn’t hold any performance or quietness crowns in the 120mm* and 140mm fan classes.
*Noctua’s Sterrox 120x25mm fans seem to about tie Thermaltake toughfan 12 pro’s.
Iam not familiar with the socket and coolers. But for the threadripper the coolers from noctua come with springs on each screw. You basically torque it down in a diagonal pattern until the screws run on block (the female thread part on the Mainboard).
Thus it pretty much compresses the thermal paste evenly. (was preaplied paste)
For the fans.
I can recommend the NF-A15 PWM
Even tho I would say one of the 2 is a tad bit louder. But this could be due to the fact that it has more gap to the tower.
Its a smart design. The push fan lays flat on the tower. The pull fan has a small gap via rubber grommets. I assume to not harm the pushed air(flow).
In terms of validating cooler installation, lift the heatsink straight off the board and check the thermal paste pattern - if there are areas with no paste (on both the CPU heatspreader and heatsink base), it wasn’t enough or it wasn’t evenly spread by pressure. If there’s paste oozed out over the side, too much was applied. Chances are that you did it just fine though as long as long as you didn’t heap it on
I will do some research into other fans. Any good comparisons? I normally go to Gamers Nexus, but I don’t think they have done a fan comparison with their new test chamber yet.
Tomshardware did a piece on the Phanteks T30 against Noctua’s best:
tldr: if you have space for 5mm extra fan thickness, Phanteks absolutely slaughters Noctuas best 120mm fan in noise-normalized performance and especially in raw performance.
and if you want OCD levels of perfromance data:
Thermaltake basically copied Noctua’s sterrox fans with its Toughfan line, so the 120mm offering basically ties Noctua while being cheaper, but TT also offers a 140mm sterrox/LCP fan which Noctua does not so TT beats Noctua in the 140mm category.
Sanyo Denki is currently making the best 92x25mm fans with their 9RA model.
Just dropping my ¢2 in, I’d go for different fans before investing in water cooling. Worst case scenario you move the 2 fans over to a radiator if the cooling capacity doesn’t meet your needs.
I’ve used Noctua fans before, and they are certainly some of the finest. But I’d also point you towards the Artic P12 fans for a lower price point. A pack of 5 120mm fans are the same as 1 Noctua 120mm, and they are awfully quiet, with the only sound coming out of them being the white noise you mentioned. Splurg a few extra bucks and the cables will even be daisy chained so you can run them all off 1 header.
140s will almost always beat 120s. Even though they are only 30% larger in size, they actually flow 50% more than 120s if all else is equal. IIRC it has something to do with the hub of the 120s hindering performance.
I stuck 3,000RPM A14s on my D15 and it would idle about 2-3C over ambient with KryoX and top out at about a +50C delta @ 260W & 2,300RPM completely heat soaked.
I ran three of those A14s as intakes in a P500A with a single A14 for exhaust. All you need to do is run the exhaust a little faster, but what is most important is getting in as much fresh intake as possible.
I have room for a 140mm in the bottom of the case, but I’m not sure about the thicker 5mm thickness for the Peerless Assassin. I found a video of someone fitting a T30 to one and it looks like an extremely tight fit. So much so that you don’t need the clips to hold the fan in place, friction will do it.
I suppose I could mount one on the front and one on the back, i.e. nothing in the middle, but that doesn’t seem like a great solution. One Phanteks and one Noctua? But they would both be running off the CPU fan header at different speeds. Maybe I can use a different fan header, I need to check the BIOS to see if they can all react to CPU temperature.
Or just wedge it… Or get two Noctuas live with very marginally lower performance.
