Water or Air Cooling.

[toille01]

I recently built a pretty decent gaming PC which I wanted to run as silently as possible. My previous PC was water cooled and I found the pump and subsequent radiator fans a little distracting. In the new build I opted for a BeQuiet! Dark Rock Pro3 and it is very quiet.

I wanted to get some extra performance from the CPU (i7 6700K) so I overclocked it. However i've noticed the CPU fan is pretty much full throttle during any gaming I do and i'm not sure if overclocking with an air cooled unit is good for my CPU. So first question - Is over clocking with an air cooler wise?

In relation to water cooling, i'm hugely tempted to get a decent unit to help my CPU, but I don't want to compromise the silent running and overclock. If anybody has any suggestions as to what cooler to use it would be very much appreciated. My previous water cooler was a Corsair and the pump and fans were pretty loud, I was thinking I could get a similar unit and replace the fans with quieter ones perhaps? Any suggestions / help would be welcome.

Thanks

 

[synphul]

I think it may depend on the fan curve you have set in the bios. I've got the same cooler on an i5 4690k oc'd to 4.6ghz and it took serious effort to get the fans to spin up where they became noticeable. Even running p95 didn't do it, I had to run p95 with all case fans turned off (an unrealistic scenario). If your fan curve is set to spin the cooler fans to a higher rpm at a lower temperature that would likely be the issue. The dark rock pro 3 is suitable for overclocking.

Have you removed the side panel of the case and verified it's the cpu cooler fans you're hearing at full throttle and not your graphics card fans? They're fairly close to one another and it would be typical for gpu fans to spin up while gaming as well as to be louder than the cpu cooler. Try to pinpoint the noise using a tube like the kind that paper towels come with and hold it up to your ear while listening to the cpu cooler and then to the gpu just to be sure which one is causing the noise.

You can quiet down a water cooler some by slowing the fans down or using slower rpm/lower airflow fans but that will cause temps to go up. It's not so much the fans themselves as the amount of air passing over the obstruction of the radiator, that will happen with any fan. Faster rpm's, higher airflow, better cooling and more noise. Lower rpm's, lower airflow through the radiator, less cooling and less noise.

 

[toille01]

Thanks for the reply synphul.

I wouldn't say the fan is loud or distracting, I was just concerned that if the fan is pretty much full throttle when gaming, is this the best cooling solution? I have positive airflow in the case (X2 140mm intake and X1 120mm exhaust) but i'll admit i've not tinkered with the fan curve in the bios/uefi - i'll take a look at that.

 

[synphul]

If the cooler is full speed because of the fan curve in the bios then it's likely running the cooler harder than necessary. Not that it will damage the cooler, just means that despite running full speed at the moment it doesn't have to run full speed to cool the cpu efficiently. Your cpu has a tdp of 91w and that will change a bit as you overclock. The dark rock pro 3 is rated for 250w tdp cooling so it should be more than enough. You'll likely run out of voltage headroom when overclocking before running into temperature problems.