xaffeine wrote:
Thanks, but that looks pretty big to me. A couple of years ago, I used a Scythe Samurai
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1049-page1.html in some Sandy Bridge builds. Those are no longer available.
Is there anything on that scale that is currently recommended for my purpose?
Well i would consider the kotestu as one of the thinner towers, there might be smaller in towers but not worth it imo specially on the TJ08-E that allows even a HR02 Macho easily. Now you can can go smaller, there are tons of coolers in the market, but a much smaller heatsink will have harder time cooling a hot running cpu, thus in most cases needing more rpms... that equates to more noise. There are diminishing returns, like huge heatsinks really dont improve that much, but the size of the Kotetsu imo is like sweet spot, even the SPCR review i linked shows how it beats a lot of towers and probably among the best you can get atm for i7 imo for price/performance/noise. And also consider the benefits of the TJ08-E is the massive frontal 180 where pushes a ton of air, a tower will also follow the same flow.
A last thing to keep in mind, is that Sandy Bridge is much easier to cool than Haswell, even my Sandy Bridge hyperthreaded Xeon 4 cores 8 threads never even passes 65C under hours of prime95, but my i7 4770K and 4790K can reach 80C easily under prime95. Intel changing the soldering for paste and moving the vrms to the chips, really increase a lot the temperatures on haswell, specially on multithreaded cpus.
Now if you prefer have to go with something smaller, then consider Noctua NH-12L, Scythe Big Shuriken RevB, Thermalright AX200.
Either way, im interested if you go with a small cooler to share your results in terms of temperatures under load on 4790, specially the rpms it takes the fans to keep it on that temps.
Good luck,