building a small pc [5/N]
Update:
After doing a more intensive load test, the system eventually stabilizes at ~70C for both CPU/GPU during the day without my ridiculously unreasonably cold Air-Conditioning. But with the AC on during the evening the system seems to plateau at 68C GPU / 63-66C CPU which makes me pretty happy. It’s also quieter than the stupid AC unit anyways…
So after some testing, the intel stock cooler really sucks!!!!
base CPU temps are around 45-55 and under moderate load it hits 65-75 C and it gets extremely loud! Literally like a motorcycle in my studio bedroom
taking the glass panel off reduces down to 60-65 under moderate load which reduces the noise a lot but its annoying to compromise like that
i spent the Sunday morning upgrading the ID IS-60 cooler with the Noctua 120x25mm fan (and removed the useless 90mm) and I’m really happy with the results!!
One consideration is that I actually had almost precisely the right space with the glass panel. With a mesh panel I could probably stretch for 5mm more and use the new highly impressive Phantex T30
… Also interesting rumors on a 2023 release for a 140mm T30 fan :) [reddit]
The other consideration was that I splurged on the swappable color rubber. What a waste of money, should have just saved $15*3=$45 and bought some new pants or something. Or just gotten three Phantex T30
a quick load test showed temps stable at around 50-55 C and its DEAD quiet.
what i wish (i could do without the time commitment) was put the standard thermal grease in, tested the temperatures and then tested the expensive “Kyronaut” one (that I was lucky to get a 40% discount on!)
Overall the difficulty here was that the screws that came with the CPU cooler didn’t really fit with the Noctua 120x25mm that I had already: good thing the hardware store near me has a phone number and opens fairly early (10:30am) and knew what 3mm screws were. Took me a while but I was able to screw the non-fitting screws into the cooler and realized about a 1cm length would work well (the standard screws were about 1.75cm which were too long)
The other consideration was the LGA1700 mounts that came with the cooler weren’t the most convenient: I had to screw the mounting screws from the bottom of the motherboard. The other annoyance was that there weren’t nice spacers so the cooler was sort of just directly sitting on the CPU, rather than being supported by the screws or spacers, and since I had to screw from the bottom, I had to flip the system over and be careful that the cooler didn’t slip off the CPU (the grease was surprisingly slippery!).