[mustangjoe]

Got my new HTPC running pretty well so far. Silverstone CW-02 case, Asrock p55 extreme, i5-750 cpu, Zalman 9500A cpu cooler, 1 case fan 120mm, 2 case fans 92mm. Getting 33 deg case/34 deg cpu for temps. Good airflow, low temps I feel.

The question that I have is it OK to remove the Zalman cpu cooler's fan, leaving the huge pain in the butt, cut ya up till you bleed, copper radiator still on the cpu and use the 9500 cooler as just a silent radiator??


I would appreciate anybody's opinion that may have tried this.


The Zalman cpu fan is just too noisy for me. It's the loudest thing in the case. I can't adjust it any lower than 1300rpm thru BIOS or Zalman's fan mate controller.


I have another near silent 120mm fan I can install in the case if I do to compensate, so that there would be four case fans. Haven't done anything yet and won't if it could damage anything, just a thought. Thanks.

 

[ArtosDracon]

Before actually removing the fan, you should try just unplugging it, and plugging the rear 120mm fan into the cpu fan connector on the motherboard and setting it to throttle with temperature. Fire it up that way and keep an eye on the cpu temps and the fan speed. If it goes well just in the bios screen then fire up windows and run a program that loads the cpu, like superpi, and again, watch the cpu temps and fan speed to see how much the rear fan has to ramp up to keep the cpu temp stable, if it can run through a 32M pass on SuperPi on all four cores, without the fan on the heatsink running, then you're good to go, there is likely nothing you'll be running that will ever load the cpu harder than four concurrent superpi's running.