Top Down Coolers Comparison Help

Cooling Processors quietly

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Victor
Posts: 11
Joined: Sun Dec 28, 2014 3:55 am

Top Down Coolers Comparison Help

Post by Victor » Sun Dec 28, 2014 7:59 am

Hello everyone. I am building a powerful mATX build about which I posted in the Case section of the forum. The last parts from my built that I can't decide on are the Case and the CPU Cooler.

So far, I've narrowed down my options to 3 products:

Be Quiet! Shadow Rock Topflow
Noctua NH-C14
Phanteks PH-TC14CS

I am looking for the best cooling to noise ratio. I would like my build to be silent in idle/medium usage, but in high load I would like my CPU to be cool enough to prolong its life. I have read great things about the Noctua and the Be Quiet!, but not much about the Phanteks. There were 2 other options that I removed recently from the list: the Raijintek Pallas and the other Phantek PH-TC12LS model. Beside cooling and noise colour scheme is not very important, but the MB and the Ram will be in Black and Red so a similar colour scheme might be nice, but NOT mandatory. I always prefer performance to looks so please keep that in mind.

I am also looking into a tower cooler option to mount in a case with top or back exhaust so that I can use less case fans, but that will depend on the case so right now it's between the Be Quiet, Noctua and Phanteks.

What do you guys think. Is buying a separate heatsink and a high performance low noise SP fan a better option or are the complete packages offered a better and solution?

Thank you kindly.

CA_Steve
Moderator
Posts: 7650
Joined: Thu Oct 06, 2005 4:36 am
Location: St. Louis, MO

Re: Top Down Coolers Comparison Help

Post by CA_Steve » Sun Dec 28, 2014 9:07 am

It's better to have one message thread for your build so everyone can see all the questions/parts in the same place. I'm transferring your case+ thread over to the System Advice forum and suggest you talk about CPU coolers there as well.

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