Top blower cooler for ITX system

Cooling Processors quietly

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Souli
Posts: 46
Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2006 8:44 am

Top blower cooler for ITX system

Post by Souli » Sat Oct 03, 2015 1:35 pm

Hi,
I am currently trying to find the right parts for my next build. It will be a mini itx gaming build for a friend and the parts that I wanna use are:

i5-6500 / 6600 (not yet decided) will undervolt the CPU
Asus H170I-Plus
Asus GTX970 Strix
16 Gb Ram and 1x SSD

The thing is I want to build it in this case: https://www.dan-cases.com/dana4.php

As you can see it is very important to select quiet components out of the box since there are no case fans or anything else that can produce noise. In the case I am limited to a top blower style cooler with a max height of 48mm including the fan. So my question is what would be my best choice for this project?
In this forum post you can see the testing he did with some of the listed coolers on his website: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1799326
He used a Xeon 1230 v2 for his tests with the fan at 100%. With the coolers he listed and the other stuff on the market what would you go for? I like the Noctua NH-L9i since that one was also tested by spcr

Abula
Posts: 3662
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 12:22 pm
Location: Guatemala

Re: Top blower cooler for ITX system

Post by Abula » Sun Oct 04, 2015 12:02 am

Souli wrote:I like the Noctua NH-L9i since that one was also tested by spcr
The noctua is one of the best low profile coolers, imo the Noctua A9 PWM is a pretty capable fan for its size, and would be kinda the cheapest route. SPCR has also tested the Kozuti which should fit, Scythe Kozuti Low Profile CPU Heatsink. But if you are looking for the best low profile cooler, he did some testing of mulitple low profile coolers, dondan DAN A4-SFX cooling performance, it seems the best you can get is the Thermolab LP53 + Noctua NF-A9 PWM or the Thermalright TY100 (I dont see it sold anywhere), but it will end up more expensive than the Noctua 9Li or the Kozuti.

Btw if you do the build, post some photos, really looks very interesting, specially the factor that seems even smaller than the NCase M1.

PS, The bad news is you got me into reading about the Thermalab DL53 so i ordered one to see how i works out on a future HTPC build =P

Souli
Posts: 46
Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2006 8:44 am

Re: Top blower cooler for ITX system

Post by Souli » Sun Oct 04, 2015 2:28 am

It will still take a while until the case is available but I will definitely post pics of the finished build in here. The case is a lot smaller than the Ncase M1 since the M1 has around 12L and the A4 only 7.25L. My biggest concern is actually the SFX-L PSU and not the cpu cooler since I am fairly certain that a good top blower cooler can handle the heat at low noise. But getting a quiet SFX-L PSU seems hard atm and it looks like that I will have to replace the fan inside the PSU to get it to the level that I want to achieve. I'm still waiting for the cryorig R7 to see how that one those the job but atm I'm leaning towards the Noctua with a different fan. Maybe it is even possible to fit a low profile 120mm on there somehow since the heatsink is only 23mm.

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