Nofan CR-80EH

My first two computer builds were made using conventional PSUs and coolers which were selected to be "quiet". They were so nice they made me wonder about "silent". I built two identical systems using Intel i7-4770S CPUs and the NoFan CR-95 cooler, which has been discontinued. I put those in CoolerMaster perforated cases with all fans and filters removed. Running fanless power supplies and the onboard Intel graphics, these things were a revelation. I am completely committed to fanless, silent computing. The CR-95 keeps those 4770S's quite cool under normal loads and even transcoding video at @100% load they don't come close to temp-throttling. The CoolerMaster cases I used are huge and I wanted to build something a little less space hungry. I used the Thermaltake Core P1 and a mini-ATX board, Seasonic fanless PSU and this NoFan CR-80 cooler and the intel i7-8700 CPU. This cooler is much smaller than the CR-95 and has less cooling capacity. Installation was much less clumsy than the CR-95. The trickiest part was assembling the mounting bracket. Getting the cooler mounted onto the CPU was very straightforward with the bolts going through the board front to back without any fussiness about positioning. (TIP: Apply your thermal compound to the CPU and invert the cooler on a table and place the mobo upside down over the cooler bolts and then tighten the nuts. Easy, and no sliding the cooler all over the CPU, which isn't so good for the thermal seal.) The cooler clears the memory and the PCH heatsink on my board but only by a paper-thin margin. On a more spacious micro-ATX or larger board, this should not be a problem and with memory farther away and this cooler's much smaller base diameter, you'll have less probability of interference than you would have with the CR-95. The Thermaltake case is all open so offers the highest possible amount of free air flow. The CPU idles in the low to mid 30°s C. Under normal task loads it mostly runs in the 40°-50°C range. Under full load, transcoding video, the CPU will hit 100°C although the load figures don't show that it actually trips throttling. This is to be expected when using Intel's Turbo Boost. When triggered, Turbo Boost forces the CPU way over its normal power rating and above the capacity of this cooler. It comes down from those temps very quickly once the task completes or you terminate it. This leads us to the caveats. THIS IS NOT FOR ANY KIND OF OVERCLOCKING. Don't buy this and complain that your overclocked rig runs too hot and has problems. I have decided to disable Turbo Boost. This does not affect most "typical" usage since the CPU is rarely working anywhere near its capacity. Performance for things like transcoding video is reduced but not by so much that it bothers me. In the open case, running near 95% CPU load while transcoding, it hovers around a max of @ 80°C with sustained use and Turbo Boost disabled. The bottom line is that this cooler works well when your goal is absolute silence and you match it with a thoughtfully selected CPU, case, and PSU, and your computing demands are reasonably normal. I would recommend that for really heavy loads, Turbo Boost be disabled to keep temps in a safe range. You will probably not notice much difference in performance and most of the time there won't be any difference. You *might* not need to do this if you run a 35 watt CPU, but I can't promise; I can only say what I see using the 65 watt CPU I have. If what I write makes you think you might run case fans with it, or you're looking at a graphics card or PSU with a fan, I would say don't bother with this cooler. You'd do at least as well with a big cooler running with a slow fan. This NoFan cooler is for when you want SILENCE and are willing to tailor everything towards achieving that goal. If that's what you want, this cooler is what you need.

I love the look of it. It has no problems cooling a 65w CPU in real world daily use and light benchmarking. Please note that it is normal for a CPU to run hotter when using passive cooling especially at idle. Noctua has a great article about this on their website in reference to their passive cooler if you want to read it. Basically you "want" the CPU to run hot because the hotter it gets, the easier the passive cooler is able to shed heat. The passive cooler becomes more and more efficient as the CPU temperature rises. So typically what you see is that a CPU idles very hot with a passive cooler, but then as the load increases the temps do not increase much because the passive cooler has hit a temp where it begins to shed heat very well. It is fine to run a CPU on the hot side, it is not going to hurt it. I do have case fans in my case but I spin them at only 300rpm so there is only a tiny amount of airflow through my case. Overall I am impressed by its performance for the size. It clears my RAM. My only real complaint is that the mounting system is not very good. I would prefer a mounting system that used springs and attached from the topside of the motherboard.

My system build is built to be quiet, but not fanless. I used the CR-80EH with an Intel 4790S. (Please note: this is the S version of the 4790, I would not try this build with a 4790K) I have a 200MM fan at the top of the case running at 700 rpm. The system has been up and running for almost a year with an Intel factory CPU fan and the same 200MM fan running at the same slow speed. With the Intel CPU fan, the CPU had an average temperature of 34C. With the CR-80EH in place (still using the 200MM case fan, still running at 700 rpm) the CPU temperature averages 28C. I've dropped 3 watts from the system power consumption, removed a mechanical point of failure to a passive cooler, that I believe is less likely to fail and dropped the CPU temperature. A win in all directions, from my point of view. The installation was straight forward, but does require that the mother board be removed. The installation was using an Asus version E9017 Z97K motherboard with an 1150 socket. I used the supplied heat sink grease which had to be painted on with a small brush. It was a little time consuming, but the outcome was quite satisfactory. I first cleaned the CPU and CR-80EH with an alcohol pad, and let it dry. Then painted the CPU, covering the entirety of the surface area, which required painting vertically and horizontally. I touched up missing spots and then repeated the process on the new CR-80EH. It is obviously working well as the temperature differential between the CPU temperature and environmental temperature is only approximately 10 degrees F.

I'm using this cooler with a Ryzen 2700, undervolted and underclocked to 2.8 GHz, in a fanless PC. The 2700 is rated at 65 watts, and will quickly reach its maximum temperature of 95°C unless underclocked. The maximum power this cooler can handle is probably closer to 40 watts. It might be able to handle 65 or 80 watts with a large case fan, although that defeats the purpose of a fanless cooler.

Perfect for a quiet PC application. I got tired of the noisy CPU fan in my old home theater PC and so I built a new one with a 35W i3 processor, one of these coolers, a cheap but quiet power supply, and a nice solid state hard drive. The fan noise was an annoying higher pitched whir with my old machine, especially during action sequences of movies (to deal with the harder work). Now I have a nearly silent and totally unobtrusive light noise from the slow turning power supply fan in the new case. If you want a quiet machine, how could you go wrong? For what it's worth, I have an ASRock H110M-HDS motherboard and an Intel i3-6100T CPU. That's a socket 1151 motherboard and this fit fine and works perfectly.

I have a PC with a Ryzen 7 3700x CPU. It works partially. Underclocking was necessary as well as multiple case fans. This CPU is too hot to keep cool without case fans which defeats the purpose. I'd say a CPU with a max of 50 watts would work.

Does it's job. Put it on my NAS/HTPC i3-4130T 35W and in the bios it's running 32-33 degrees Celsius. Stock Intel cooler was running 35 degrees. Room temp was 76 F on both. Sorry only got the bios temps. (Added later).. forgot to mention I have a slow turning fan at the top of the case. With it off it shot up to 40C. I'm leaving that one on. It's silent enough. I would have been fine with a couple degrees hotter given a fan cooler will collect dust and not cool as well most of it's life when you're no longer paying as much attention to the temps. A fanless one shouldn't have this issue and temps should remain fairly constant I would think. You can use the sizing chart on NoFan's website to see if it fits your mobo. It said mine was fine in all areas, but if I ever have to unplug the CPU power cable, I'm going to be in trouble. BTW: This is an early review, I just installed. Unless the thing falls off the CPU, I'm sure I'll be fine down the road. 9/11/2014: Tried it fanless with prime95 and got it in the low 70s rising very slowly, so switched back to top fan which btw is close to the cooler. Prime95 100% Cpu usage raised it flucuating in the high 50s to low 60s constant at 76 degree room temp.

I think I am going to be sending this back, unfortunately. It seems well built, and install was very easy and robust (proper metal brackets, not plastic crap like is used on many other coolers). I have emailed NoFan asking about the situation (though I haven't heard back yet), but after testing, I'm convinced that they probably can't say anything that will change my results/mind at this point, so I'm going ahead with this review. Despite claims of being able to handle 80 watts TDP, my I5 4690S (65 watt TDP says Intel) based 100% fanless build runs WAY too hot with 0 fans in play (63 to 65 C at idle just watching the BIOS screen, and I gave up on seeing how high it would go with the OS booted and a 25 to 30 percent CPU load (as generated by Chrome and a couple graphic heavy pages from CNN) when it hit 70C and I started smelling the early signs of cooking electronics coming out of the case. The case has massive vent areas front, back, top, bottom, and side - so much that it might as well be running in the open air in terms of airflow, so it's not an airflow issue. It's also a bare system with no extras, just CPU, RAM, and a SSD (mounted well away from the MB) - no add on card's, nothing added on that would be generating heat. I think if you want to run 100% fanless, you really need to spend the extra $$ on the CR95, and maybe an even lower power CPU than the S series, but I am just guessing, I have not tried a CR95. I also tested with a low speed case fan installed right next to where the CR80EH sits, and that went a long way towards sorting it out. It will hold around 40 C at idle with the case fan on at 800RPM, but under any significant load (I had Windows do it's built in performance test for my experiment), it rapidly spun up to 65 C and had the test carried on longer than the minute or so it did, I presume would have kept climbing. So, as far as I could tell, the only way to make this viable will be to kick the case fan up to 1500RPM (at which point it gets annoyingly loud), and even at that, might need to add another case fan. I even tried under-clocking the CPU, but it didn't change anything as far as I could tell (maybe a degree or two cooler, but it was so slight it was hard to tell). This is probably a very workable cooler for something like an Intel T or U series (or other ultra-low TDP CPU) in a totally fanless setup, or probably even the full 80 watt TDP in a scenario where you didn't mind still having case fans going fast enough to keep significant airflow moving over the CR80, but for a 100% fanless build like I was trying to pull off, I am convinced that it's just not enough. I'm going to be better off noise-wise with a more traditional style cooler sporting an ultra-low noise fan than I am with enough case fans going to make this work for my uses (I am going to be using this for an audio/video studio computer, so it's going to see some significant load over extended periods of time). Footnotes: I used the included thermal paste that's the paint-on kind. I might get better results if I used some of the higher end stuff that comes in a syringe and can be distributed as a drop in the middle of the CPU and mashed out flat to prevent air bubbles, but I can't imagine that would be night and day different. I will come back and update this review if anything changes my mind along the way. Footnote: Yeah, this thing went back. I dropped a CoolerMaster 612 v2 with a Noctura ultra-low-noise fan on it (which is honestly dead silent, I can't hear it at all), and it will hold the temp at idle to about 25 C (only about 5C above room temperature!), and I can let Prime95 run for hours and never get a CPU temp over 55C. I adore the idea of a Fanless CPU cooler, but this one doesn't cut it for me. It's better to use a fan and keep the temp borderline cold than it is to have no fan and your CPU run hot as blazes all the time.