LGA 775 / LGA 1366 Heatsink Air Cooler

Question

I am looking for recommendations for an air cooling solution which will fit either LGA 1366 or LGA 775 motherboard mounts.

Ideally I am looking for the best performance, but certainly want something quieter than the stock intel cooler. (Which makes a horrendous racket.)

I have heard that Akasa coolers perform well. See this link. (However this is quite outdated now.) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/07/review_accessory_cpu_coolers/?page=7

In terms of price, of course the lower the better. I would prefer not to spend more than about $60 or 50GDP. If I end up spending that much I guess I might as well but a Zalman CNPS8900, which I have heard also performs well. Edit: Just read some more about the CNPS8900 - apparently its very noisy when running at full speed.

Answer 1

The 2 answers above are good answers, but I thought I'd add what I actually went for in the end.

I bought an Akasa Nero 3, which has the push-pin style mounts for LGA775 / LGA1366. (They are adjustable with a sliding pin.)

I like this fan because it's fairly light weight (which is important as I move my computer to and from different rented accommodation regularly), inexpensive and fairly quiet. (Much quieter than the stock intel cooler. I can hear my GPU fans idling now.)

In addition, the 4 heatpipes are in direct contact with the CPU... They aren't polished quite as nicely as more expensive coolers, which perhaps means their performance is slightly reduced, however they are in direct contact so there isn't an additional metal component for heat to diffuse through, so I think overall it's probably got quite good performance.

I managed to overclock my i7 920 to 4.2 GHz before it just got too hot to overclock further... I didn't even have to change the voltages... Presumably it would go even higher, but it would need an even bigger cooler! By lowering the multiplier I reached a base clock of about 220 MHz. Here I was limited by the motherboard or CPU becoming unstable. Increasing the voltages didn't help... I suspect it may be the motherboard limiting here, but I'm not sure.

Answer 2

You might consider the Zalman CNPS5X PERFORMA off Amazon for $25.91. It's not too loud at 100% speed and I was able to use it to cool an i7 6700k being stress tested at 4.6Hz (I was getting about 85C - 90C) (I've also upgraded since then). All in all, it's a great cooler, installation is super easy, you literally just snap it in, you don't need to take the motherboard out.

Hope this helps :D

n.b. It supports LGA 775, not 1366.

^{Zalman CNPS5X PERFORMA}

Answer 3

I'm going to make an uncommon recommendation on the basis that while you may not have heard of this brand or solution, it is definitely what I believe you need. I recommend the DEEPCOOL GAMMAXX 300 120mm CPU Cooler for Intel.

I've used Deepcool fans before so I know that they are decently built and quiet if installed correctly. Moreover, this design fits not only socket 775 but also socket 1366, so it will be adaptable to your needs (it's even rated for up to 130W TDP CPUs, which covers almost the entire range of CPUs on either socket). Finally, it costs less than the competition mentioned so far - at $17.99, it's a good deal.

The only potential downside to this cooler I can see is a relatively large height (135.7 mm) and (possibly) poor overclocking performance relative to the standard of our age, the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo (which is not a quiet solution by any means), due to its inferior heat pipe configuration.

^{Deepcool GAMMAXX}