My father recently complained about the noise my system makes with 4 Corsair quiet edition AF fans, r9 290, and a Stock AMD heatsink. I told him that unless I buy a better heatsink and fan, the noise will continue. He said, 'All right lets go to the store, they cost like 10 dollars max, hell even a dollar. Anything more and you are just paying for the brand" I smiled since a DECENT heatsink costs like 30-50 and a fan is around $8-15 each. I cant really put it into words because I dont know, but can you tell me why they cost what they do, and what makes aftermarket fans/coolers so special?
How to explain cpu cooler/fan brand importance?
- Thread starter Ferrin
- Start date
why_wolf
Splendid
- Aug 28, 2015
- 3,531
- 25
- 26,940
Because aftermarket heatsinks and fans are a specialty market. The vast bulk of PCs, like 99% of them, use the stock heatsink. Stock heatsinks only care about keeping the CPU under the thermal limit so if they can do that by having the fan run twice as fast as an aftermarket cooler and save .10 cents on their end of things they will. Same with cheaping out on material costs; all aluminum vs copper.
So since aftermarket heatsinks and fans are a specialty market, prices are automatically higher because they can't make a profit off of volume so they need to charge more for each unit. Add in using better materials in a larger size (heatsink) and having more precision and tighter QA (fans) it costs more.
In terms of cost to make, which is probably what he is complaining about, he is right. There is not $30 worth of aluminum and cooper in the heatsink. Of course there also isn't $20k worth of metal in the car he drives either.
I'd put it like this. Those fans and heatsinks that cost $10 bucks will have the exact same performance as the one you already have. So it's actually a waste of money to spend so little because nothing will change. So either spend the $30 or don't spend anything at all.
So since aftermarket heatsinks and fans are a specialty market, prices are automatically higher because they can't make a profit off of volume so they need to charge more for each unit. Add in using better materials in a larger size (heatsink) and having more precision and tighter QA (fans) it costs more.
In terms of cost to make, which is probably what he is complaining about, he is right. There is not $30 worth of aluminum and cooper in the heatsink. Of course there also isn't $20k worth of metal in the car he drives either.
I'd put it like this. Those fans and heatsinks that cost $10 bucks will have the exact same performance as the one you already have. So it's actually a waste of money to spend so little because nothing will change. So either spend the $30 or don't spend anything at all.
Most aftermarket heat sinks will have a lot more surface area for cooling than the stock coolers. Given that, the after market coolers typically have larger fans that can run at lower rpms (compared to stock) to deliver the same airflow or even require less airflow to move the same amount of heat away. Lower RPM's typically mean less noise. ya di ya da ya da ... bigger more efficient coolers don't need high speed fans to cool well.
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