Need your opinions on cooler choices

[Ahokas99]

I came up with a new dilemma, what air cooler now? I'll be ordering it today. 

It will be used for my rig (specs in signature)

 

In short, D14 does fit in with the Sabertooth brownish and tan color, and performs about the best and would be the most silent option.

The Phanteks has white accent which fits too on the build (white fans, white gtx logo)

The BeQuiet! cooler is one sexy motherf*cker with the top brushed look, but it has the least performance, but still beats 212 easily.

 

ATM using the 212 Evo and it handles the cpu fine at 4.4Ghz but i need more silence/performance, just bit extra for my internet wiener length.

[TheAmazingCookieFromSquare]

Phanteks because it looks the best

 

Only get Dark Rock Pro 3 because the regular dark rock is ugly asf

 

and then we have noctua....

its hideous but has best performance. But dude the noctua dual tower heatsink is frekin cancer its ugly i cant handle it. Maybe buy the noctua heatsinks and slap be quiet fans on it like i can't bare to look at noctua fan colors 

[nobelharvards]

Yeah, I'll help you with your "choises", if you educate me on what that is. Is that Finnish for "choices"?

Any fan can be quiet if you turn them low enough, but you will be compromising performance.

 

Any cooler can have its effectiveness increased by ramping up the fan speed, but at the cost of noise.

 

Noctua fans (and in turn, their coolers overall), generally have the best performance/noise ratio.

 

Noctua treat their customers better than other companies. When a new socket comes out, they offer free mounting hardware upon giving them your proof of purchase of your Noctua product and the motherboard with the relevant socket.

 

All this VIP treatment comes at a cost. Noctua products are generally priced higher.

 

Be Quiet is fine in terms of performance/noise ratio. A bit behind Noctua. Tends to lean slightly more towards low noise than performance. A bit cheaper too.

 

Be Quiet has subpar mounting hardware.

 

Phanteks has good mounting hardware.

 

Noctua and Cryorig both have excellent mounting hardware. It almost becomes enjoyable to mount and remount a cooler.

Another thing to remember. The pitch of the noise. Noctua have researched a lot. Every curve, every bump in their fans, has been designed so what little noise they do make, ends up sounding pleasant (generally a low pitch fan noise is considered less annoying than a high pitch one, and less audible even if at the same dBA). The low pitch sound is also constant, not choppy or "gratey".

 

Coolers that outsource their fans tend to either sound high pitched (annoying) or "gratey" (choppy like, inconsistent).
 

If you are the sort of person to play dress up with your computer and do not care about performance, Noctua is a bad choice because poop brown. Pick one of the other two.

 

If you are this sort of person, I also recommend you pick your wife purely based on looks. I mean, who cares about anything else, right?

[Ahokas99]

12 minutes ago, nobelharvards said:

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ty for the grammar tips i hoep u liek dis.....(we have a saying for this in Finland : Pilkun nussintaa = F*cking the comma)

 

On a serious note, the statistics for Phanteks fan's show only 19'ish dBa at full 1200rpm, while there are two of them I don't know how much that would affect the end result

 

 

I knew it was a stupid choice to ask anything on this forum, there is always someone having a bad day. 

And what if looks are important to me? And yeah the D14 is there because it fits the "theme" of the motherboard. 

[WoodenMarker]

4 hours ago, EbinNator2044 said:

I knew it was a stupid choice to ask anything on this forum, there is always someone having a bad day. 

I'm not sure if I'm seeing what you're seeing. @nobelharvards's post seemed pretty informative.

4 hours ago, nobelharvards said:

Phanteks also has subpar mounting hardware.

The PH-TC14PE's mounting hardware is actually very similar to the NH-D14's. 

Either are great choices. The DR3 on the other hand isn't even in the same tier of coolers and is more similar to a NH-U12S or PH-TC12DX in performance.