What's the best fan

[bigfoot]

Ok as the title say's I need to get another fan for the cpu cooler , I have the thermalright 120 extreme cooler with a sharkoon 120x120mm fan at 2400 rpm + 81cfm but its 39db noise is a bit much so I am looking for something which will cool as well if not better but not so noisy, the question is does a higher cfm and more rpm mean better cooling ?? I am not so sure, any suggestions ?

[srpeters18]

CFM(Cubic Feet per Minute) means how much air the fan moves. RPM doesn't matter in regards to cooling efficieny. It has more to do with noise, generally the higher the RPM the noisier the fan will be, but there are exceptions. As far as system fans go, I've found the Yate Loons to be excellent, and they run about $6 each. Don't know how your HSF performs temp wise, but a ThermalTake V1 is pretty good.

[sushrukh]

Bigfoot, you've already got the best air cooler.Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme with a Scythe SFlex 120mm fan would be ideal.2nd choice of the fan would be a Noctua 120mm.

[bigfoot]

Well I did a little experiment today to answer the question , I put a inline speed controller
on the cpu fan and disabled the smart fan then reduced the speed by about 2 3rd's till it was near silent and left it for about 3 hours this would have reduced the cfm considerably and there was practicality no difference in temp's about 1c overall which would seem to say that the more cfm a fan has does not mean the better cooling it is . The fan controller got a bit hot though ?? so i put it back to how it was after .

coolermaster stacker 830 case
Hiper 880w psu
Thermalright 120 extreme cooler ( new fan to come )
xfx 780i mobo
QX6850 cpu
2 x 1gb corsair Dominator pc2 8500 c5
2 x xfx 8800gt alphadogs sli
2 x 250gb maxtor sata2
2 x samsung writemaster lightscribe
vista ultimate 32 bit

[foxmobouser]

Can you just replace the 120 fan with one that has less dba and good airflow? Like some models of "SilenX"

[bigfoot]

That's what i intend to do now, but that shows that more is not necassarily better , I will get a couple of fans and see which is best