My current Noctua NH-D14 works well though. But like all air coolers, during summer it's not so efficient, and it takes up so much space!

The Zalman CNPS20LQ looks to be a perfect match for my FT02 case, with the radiator sitting in the top 120mm fan housing, and with all the positive pressure airflow from the 3 bottom case fans, even my existing Scythe Slipstream should be able to move enough it to cool it and stay quiet
And it's a sealed system that uses non conductive liquid gel stuff, so no maintenance issues, and more like a heatpipe system

The main thing is the pump audible?


http://www.quietpc.com/products/watercooling/cnps20lq


So a Zalman fan mate or similar would be needed at the least

I don't think there is any water cooler of that type that comes with quiet pump (some undervolt theirs, but over longer time period a pump might have to be run at higher speeds) so I'd stick with the NH-D14. If it's not good enough then a water cooler isn't likely to do better at the same noise level. If you're overclocking a lot then just dial it back a little if the room gets so hot during summer.

I agree. Both the water cooler and the air cooler will have to transmit the same quantity of heat that will be removed with basically the same quantity of moving air. But the water cooler has one additional source of noise, the water pump.

Thanks guys, it makes sense. And they are more expensive to boot

But they are a lot neater around the CPU.
Maybe in the future a heatpipe style cooler with a flexible tube instead, that can sit a massive heatsink/radiator outside that PC that runs passively would be ideal

One qualification: If you have large quantities of heat to move - like a massive video card coupled with some heavy duty overclocking - then water cooling has the heft to move that volume of heat. Though moving that quantity of heat is never going to be silent.

One other thing, if you study all the various bench testing and comparative testing done on the NH-D14, you will notice that it is not the most efficient cooler at idle. It really comes into its own only after their is a fair amount of heat to be moved. It may actually be overkill for most people with a modern non-overclocked Intel CPU.

If you are running a modern Intel CPU, consider a downdraft NU-D14 with one 120mm underhung Nexus fan running at about 600-700 rpm. It will keep your capacitors and VRMs cool and will kick up very little noise. It will take up less space, but in a different kind of way.

The cooler from Zalman is not that different form the models from Antec. Keep the D14.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1214-page7.html

I do run an overclocked i7 3930k at 4.4ghz, which idles at 35-41 degrees Celsius , 60-65 under full core load, on the Noctua NH-D14, with Intel speed step and C1E off
But it's winter right now 10-15 degrees ambient.
I will be going back to my i7 970 6 core system which runs much cooler for some reason, and not much slower. Loads only hitting 50 degrees at 3.8 ghz.
Even my previous i7 930 at 4ghz quad core CPU was hitting the same temperature ratings as 3930k - you would think a 6 core 970 would be much hotter having more cores than the 930. And a larger die size than the 3930k, at a not much lower core speed.

I think some chips just run cooler than other chips, even if they are the same model. And the quality of the heat sink mounting apparently can contribute a few degrees of difference as well. Heck even the thermal paste you use can mean a few degrees one way or the other.... at least that is what seems to be the case if you look at some of these reviews.

The 970 is a 32 nm Gulftown core, and the 930 is a 45 nm Bloomfield, that's why the latter runs hotter.
The 3930K on the other hand is a hot running 32 nm SB-E, and it also has the largest die.

Maybe drop the speed to 4.0 GHz just for the summer? It's easier than changing board. Next year you will be able to upgrade to IB-E.
Or, get some serious liquid cooling.

Ivy Bridge is known to run hotter than expected. Intel used to solder the heat spreader to the CPU die before, but with IB they switched to thermal paste.

Wow, didn't know the i7 970 was that much better and smaller than the 930, good upgrade then, bought it second hand for half the price, 2 weeks ago

I currently have both an Gigabyte X58a-UDR3 and i7 970, running at 4 ghz (1.27V core), 12GB at 1333mhz - just stress tested with Prime, stable this morning.
When I render with all cores, it's not as hot as Prime, so Prime is like worst case scenario
Cooled with a Noctua NH-D14 with fans running around 670 rpm under motherboard control, pretty quiet, hottest core peaking at 66 degrees with 19 degree ambient, but it goes up and down a lot.
I never had the V core this high on this board, usually more like 1.24v at 3.8ghz and the same for when I had the i7 930 a 4 ghz.
It's a running a bit hotter, but not too bad at all for 6 cores, no worse than thequad core 930 at 4ghz. Idles around 33-35 degrees on the hottest core.

I also have the Asus P9X79 and 3930k, at 4.4 ghz (1.31v core when loaded, actual is more like 1.33v), 16Gb at 1600mhz. Cooled with a Noctua NH-D14 SE2011 edition
But only one Silverstone FT02 case, so this is sitting in boxes right now

The difference in speed when rendering the same scene isn't that much TBH
3930k at 4.4ghz does a shade over 1 million samples a second vs i7 970 a 4ghz for 850,000 samples.
970 at 3.85ghz, which is where I normally run it, hits 820,000 samples and runs 5 degrees cooler than at 4ghz
Considering the cost difference of the platforms, but x79 platform has much faster SSD read/write speeds though!
Like double the speed....

But my Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle USB3.0 video capture card doesn't work on the X79, needs an NEC chipset USB3.0 interface and was designed around the x58 chipset, so it's another reason why I'm thinking of staying X58 for a bit - sigh