Hi,

I have a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus on a i7 in a Fractal Design R3 chassi. The fan noise is way to heigh even on non-load, it is much higher then the last build I had with Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro rev.2 on Intel Q6600 in a Antec Sonata 2 chassi.

The question is if I only need to change the fan on my Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus? And if so, witch fan?

One sugestions would be a Scythe Gentle Typhoon 120mm - 1450 RPM but thay do not set the proper rpm dynamic, instead the rpm is fixed and this feels really like a old solution. The motherboard knows the degrees on the CPU and should be able to set the correct rpm on the fan.

The motherboard I got is : Asus P8Z68-V PRO GEN3

Check the temperatures. Perhaps the motherboard simply isn't regulating the CPU fan well enough.

You could also consider using the FanXPert (Windows application) to control the fan. It can be found in the ASUS AI Suite.

Did anything become of this? Is there a quieter, variable fan? In an Antec Three Hundred, it's loud enough that I can hear the annoying variation in speed whenever there's the slightest CPU activity. I don't know why it has to react so quickly, but it does.

A fixed speed Nexus undervolted to about 800 rpm will be quiet and do a good job of moving air.

PWM fans seem to be louder than non-PWM fans and some people are annoyed, like you, about speed variation. I don't think SPCR has ever identified a PWM fan as good as a non-pwm fan. Maybe this will change, Mike tells me that SPCR is about to publish a new set of fan tests.

One hopeful sign is the Noctua has just started to sell a new line of PWM fans. I'm sort of hoping that these might end up being good PWM fans.

Sounds like a plan. So you're thinking of something like the Nexus BASIC D12SL-12 with a Zalman Fanmate 2 (or whatever's appropriate)?

A Nexus at 700 or 800 rpm it's going to be basically silent.... most people will not hear it.

No doubt, but their fixed-speed fans, like that one, bottom out at 1000rpm (18 dBA) by default, which is why I mentioned the Zalman as one potential way of dropping it a bit.

Interestingly, I see that the CM212+ is supposedly 13dBA at its minimum of 600RPM (mine's typically 700RPM), so I'm not sure why I hear it varying speeds, but I do.