Nofan CR-95C IcePipe 95W Fanless CPU Cooler

Anyone with first hand experience of this CPU cooler?

http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/ultragrade/nof-cr-95c

Here is the frostytech review of the Nofan CPU cooler
http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.c ... 665&page=7
(look near the bottom - do a search for nofan)
It performs much better than you might expect it to

Sounds impressive!

actually, it doesn't sound at all

Put simply it works.
It is big and so it has its cons for example you lose your first PCI slot but it is absolutely a fully passive CPU cooler.

My current project is turning my media centre in to a gaming machine as well now I have run a Q6600 completely passive for over 2 years but adding a gaming video card
up until very recently just has not been realistic (it did have the 6670 but thats rubbish).

The machine is now an I5 2400 (got the chip cheap or I would have gone Ivybridge) with the CR-95C and note even under load the cooler never really feels hot and chip is reading very low indeed. I run a Thermaltake fanless PSU that has now been going for about 5 years and a 6670 passive card and of course it is SSD and no opticals.
This is housed in a stripped down Antec 900 case (all fans removed and drive bays as well as side window removed)

Fully loaded this barely even gets warm and as it is I see no need for fans at all. 100% passive machine that has absolutely no heat issues and it is summer here or as close as this part of the world ever gets.

However ...

The next step is adding a 7850 with a passive cooler adding another 100w of heat kicking in to the case at full load. At this point I suspect I may be forced to have fans but they will be on a controller and will only kick in under load. For similar reasons the PSU I intend to replace with a semi fanless model.

The ice-pipe cooler certainly lives up to its promises. I bought a pre-built system from http://www.quietpc.com/ a year ago (i7 2600K, Vertex3, 4GB ram). The only moving component in the system is the dvd drive; cooling is entirely passive. Running the prime95 torture test, 100% load on all 4 cores, the CPU temp holds steady in the high 60's, degrees C (ambient temp around 25 degrees C). In normal use it ranges from mid 30's to low 40s depending upon the time of year. It *is* a big cooler though so probably not an option if you want a high end gaming rig.

A year on and it's still performing as good as the day I bought it. Of course, having a silent PC means I can hear the hum from my cheap monitor - but, I recently fixed this by getting a new monitor (ZR2740W) that doesn't use PWM for dimming the backlight.