Many folks who buy assembled or for that matter bought branded PCs tend to overlook the importance of one key factor in the craft of PC building, which is to take care of heat dissipation. I read about this after going through some newegg videos and could immediately correlate to the ideas as I have worked for a telecommunication equipment manufacturer (though on the software side) working with Compact PCI and ATCA chasis with tightly packed computing boards and loud whirring fans. And we know how big a killer heat is. Of computer equipment that is.
Most friends who I approached for advice for assembling a new PC had the stock coolers supplied with the Intel/AMD CPUs they had. The shopkeeper who sold me the computer parts (and assembled it) in Bangalore's Computer Street (S.P. Road) possibly did not think that a separate add on cooler was a required or mandatory part and made no recommendation. A stock cooler is the norm.
But i had other ideas based on my experience. That's why I bought one of the best air cooled Chassis on the market, the Coolermaster HAF-X in the first place. Big guy with a lot of big & small fans to move air. And I came back after the initial build for a CPU Air Cooler and bought the Coolermaster Hyper 212 EVO (which is an entry level budget air cooler to my reading & assessment) after failing to get the V6 GT locally or online in India. Did a DIY installation with manual and web videos help and mounted two 120 mm PWM LED fans (more about this later):
I will sell you some numbers to highlight the value of this device to my computer.
Stock cooler: Idle Temps of 42-44 deg. centigrade, Full load Temps of 100 deg. (with Prime 95 torture test with 99% CPU usage on all 4 cores of my Core i7-2600K CPU)
CM Hyper 212 Evo: Idle Temps of 34-36 deg. centigrade, Full load Temps of 60-63 deg (sustained at this level even with a 8 hour run)
A good 5-6 degrees on idle and 40 degrees on loading.
The ambient temperature in the room was around 30 degree centigrade. I felt some throttling by the CPU in the former case at full load and that's how it was holding on to a temperature of 100 degrees. And all this with a budget aftermarket air cooler. The high end CPU coolers from Noctua (like the NH-D14) when combined the famed Artic Silver 5 thermal paste (i used the one from Coolermaster that came with the cooler) are reported to run 15-20 degrees cooler at full load and possibly just a few degrees cooler than what the Hyper 212 gave me at idle state.
If you think that we are going to do even a moderate 50% loading of CPU, you can guess how much the CPU cooler can help. That said if you are going to use a computer just for browsing, downloading, watching streaming videos, blogging, uploading some content, you will do fine with the stock cooler that come with a CPU. Just don't buy an i7 then. Settle for a dual core i3 with lower clock speeds.
To my judgement, therefore, an air cooler is a must for a workstation (that's my use case) or a server (where you can expect higher loads continuously). And if you are a gamer (who's going to potentially overclock also), you should open your purse and go for a high end cooler (100$+ range with two fans). For a thinner installation, I think the CM Hyper 212 (just a shade above Rs. 2000/- in India) is a VFM addition (read insurance) which will help in prolonging the usable life of the CPU.
More on cooler installation in the subsequent posts
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