Question regarding heatsink and fan controller

[AliasXNeo]

I've been looking to upgrade my current rig by moving into a CM HAF 932 and throwing a Prolimatech Megahalem onto my CPU. I have two concerns though.

First of all, should I go for a fan control system? I'm looking to keep this chassis as quiet as possible, and from what I understand a fan control system can help achieve this. The problem is I've never dealt with them and know very little. Can anyone point me in the right direction here?

Secondly, what fans should I be putting on this Megahalem? From what I've been reading I need 1 or 2 good 120X38mm fan(s), but I'm not sure what to go for? Again, noise is a huge factor for me. Any suggestions?

Cheers,
Josh

 

[DaRuSsIaMaN]

Hmm... as far as I understand, the bios manages all your fan controlling needs. What other fan control system do you have in mind?

Via the plug of the fan into the motherboard, the bios automatically adjusts the cpu fan speed based on the cpu temperature. You can somewhat influence its behavior, though. In my bios, for instance, you can specify what fraction of the maximum fan speed should be the minimum fan speed. In other words, even at a low cpu temp, the fan will keep going at some fraction of the maximum possible speed (by default, mine is 10/15 of the max speed). And if you want, you can adjust this fraction to go higher if you want maximum cooling at all times... which is what I wanted, so I just set it to 100% always.

Other than that, do you need any more control? To make your chassis quiet, simply get quiet fans. Good retailers will provide the noise rating of a given fan. Really quiet is probably somewhere about 25dB? Not sure, though.

To address your second question, why do you ask about fans rather a fan? A quick search on this (extreme-looking!) heatsink seems to reveal that it accepts just 1 fan of 120mm size. Not sure why you say 1 or 2 fans...

Also, going back to your first question... here they list some fan options for this heatsink... And I see that the third bullet lists a fan that is 9dBA!! I think that should be insanely quiet! Only weird thing is they're listing dBA instead of dB, and I don't know what exactly that means... Regardless, it shouldn't matter much. The bottom line is if you got that 9dBA fan, you could just run it at 100% speed all the time and be completely satisfied. No fan speed control needed lol.