Looking for a moderate size, quiet budget cooler for i7-7700 non-K

[midix]

What would you recommend for a quiet, little but capable cooler under 50 EUR price, and hopefully with more solid attachment instead of push pins?

 

My main reason for the cooler upgrade is that Kaby Lake i7-7700 Intel stock fan sounds awful. It is really quiet while idle, but when I'm working and compiling a project in Visual Studio, the fan sounds like being tortured, the noise going up and down again and again. Really annoying. The temps are OK, never over 70 C, so nothing to complain about. Just that noise.

 

The case is Fractal Design Define Mini, it should accept ~160mm CPU cooler, but I don't wan't to buy something that large because that would be an overkill for non-overclockable system and also it would occupy too much space inside the case.

 

CPU is i7-7700. Motherboard is Gigabyte GA-H270M-D3H. RAM is just two cheap Crucial 8GB modules  CT2K8G4DFD8213. I guess, most coolers should fit just fine.

My planned budget is under 50 EUR. I know I could get the famous Cooler Master 212X or 212 EVO, but it seems an overkill.

 

I have looked also at some other options, but many of them have Intel-style plastic push pins. Maybe they are OK, but I have had one of them snap out of place once, although right before that I inspected all of them on the back of the motherboard under a magnifying glass and they all seemed to have pushed through correctly. Go figure, but I just don't feel safe with those push pins.

 

Some rant: I'm wondering, what Intel have done to their newest cooler design. I have had no such noise issues with my old Sandy Bridge i3 stock fan, but it has twice as high aluminium plates and maybe that's why the fan is not being used that aggressively thus leading to much quieter operation. Or maybe I need to tweak some fan profiles, but I don't wan't CPU temps go higher than 70 C just for the sake of quietness.

[Damascus]

If you want something quiet get the Cryorig/Noctua/Be Quiet! ITX or mini coolers

[Droidbot]

the older stock coolers are better, the ""new"" stock cooler is worse. intel removed the heat-removing copper slug and made it thinner, which makes the fan work harder.

 

gammaxx 400 is a very good cooler, nice blue led as well

[DocSwag]

Be quiet pure rock is pretty good, a more expensive option would be the Noctua NH-U12s though quite honestly it's probably a little overkill for you. I'd probably get the pure rock as be quiet fans are usually pretty quiet and you won't be overclocking at all.

[chris76816]

Cryorig C7

[WoodenMarker]

Have you tried lowering your fans speeds?

You're fine up to 80-90c at load. 70c is unnecessarily low.

[midix]

Thanks for suggestions.

 

I have looked at Gammaxx 400, Be quiet pure rock (slim edition because full edition seems too large), Cooler Master Hyper TX3 EVO  - they all have push pins.

 

Cryorig C7 for some reason is not available in local shops, but I found CRYORIG M9i, looks ok judging from some reviews. Also, I'll take a look also at ITX options.

 

I'll try too look into fan speed settings, although I'd like to leave it at defaults there.

[Terryv]

Hyper T4 should do nicely 

[midix]

I just noticed I can get be quiet! Shadow Rock LP for about 40 EUR.

 

But still M9i (30 EUR) has slightly better cooling, according to some tests, and also I could get Raijintek Pallas (overkill for me, I guess) for the same price as Shadow Rock. So now I'll have to do some measurements to find out which of these will fit better for my setup.

[WoodenMarker]

12 hours ago, midix said:

I have looked at Gammaxx 400, Be quiet pure rock (slim edition because full edition seems too large),

I'll try too look into fan speed settings, although I'd like to leave it at defaults there.

The Pure Rock is about the same size as the Gammaxx 400. 

Manually setting your fan speeds is almost a necessity if you want lower noise.

9 hours ago, midix said:

I just noticed I can get be quiet! Shadow Rock LP for about 40 EUR.

But still M9i (30 EUR) has slightly better cooling, according to some tests, and also I could get Raijintek Pallas (overkill for me, I guess) for the same price as Shadow Rock.

The SLRP is quieter than the M9i. For a locked cpu, more performance means little to nothing if the goal is lower noise.

[midix]

Thank you.

 

I found that Gigabyte has hidden a pretty nice fan control in their System Information Viewer. Shame on Gigabyte for hiding system tweaking features in a software named "Viewer".

 

It seems, my CPU default fan settings actually were too aggressive because I was able to adjust the fan profile to be much quieter while running a stress test, and temperatures were ok.

 

I could also adjust this in BIOS, but it would be complicated to immediately see how fan & temperatures behave under heavy load. So, maybe I'll be OK without any other cooler for some time.