Right now my case is pretty loud with all my fans 3 80 mm, one 120 mm, and the stock hsf for my amd 3700+. And most of my fans are at about 30 db or so, and i wanted to know if replacing all my fans with stuff closer to 20 db would make much of a difference. And any brand or product recommendations would be great. Also which is better for cpu cooling arctic cooling or zalman.
Getting quiet fans will help with lower sone ratings. Panaflo are good quiet fans. As for CPU HSF, the Arctic Freezer range have very good reviews and so do some Zalmans. I'd go for the Freezer range though.
yeah defintely go with the freezer range, i have the socket 478 one and its extremely quiet, the only thing in my case that makes it noisy is the PSU, cant wait for my new one to arrive. Change the case fans as well, try and get as much CFM as you can without going much over 20db.
Also the Freezers have great cooling abilties, i dont know about the socket 939/754 version (i dont know what socket your cpu is) but mine has my Celeron Cooled to 20*C at idle and my CPU is overclocked from 2.6 to 3.14GHz so for an air cooled solution, go for the freezer. they are quite big so make sure you have enough space to fit it.
If my AMD athlon 64 3700+ SD core is running 35 idle - 42 load with stock HSF and stock thermal paste, how much do you think this arctic cooling fan would lower it. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16835186123. Should i step up to the arctic freezer4 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16835185115 will this provide a noticable increase in performance. And are the coolers like the thermalrigth xp 90's worth the extra $. Also with the extra cooling would a small overclock to 2.4 or so hurt the systems life span or anything else on my sytem.
