Nofan CR-95C IcePipe 95W Fanless CPU Coolers Ultra

Surprised just how cool this is keeping my 6 core AMD FX 6100. Thing I didn’t appreciate was how much my old CPU cooler was cooling other components, so two of the heat sensors are now reading 50 degrees most of the time. Will probably need to fit another case fan for summer. One thing that has amazed me is how quickly the CPU cools after the load drops.

After many years, using some sort of rotating fans/coolers in various PC parts, I decided to go completely fanless and bought this CR-95C Copper cooler along with Nofan CS-80 case. So far, after few weeks of use, experience for both products are great. This CR-95C Copper fanless cooler really delivers what it promises. For my setup I used these (carefully chosen) parts:

Intel Core i7 4790T cpu, Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD5H motherboard, Crucial Ballistix Tactical LP 16GB DDR3 ram kit, SeaSonic Platinum-400 Fanless (SS-400FL2 Active PFC F3) PSU, Nofan CS-80 case.

When my system is in idle/low activity, temperatures (measured using AIDA 64 extreme) in my case are following:

• Motherboard - 34C
• CPU - 32C
• CPU Package - 39C
• CPU IA Cores - 40C
• CPU GT Cores - 39C
• CPU Core 1 - 40C
• CPU Core 2 - 35C
• CPU Core 3 - 38C
• CPU Core 4 - 37C
• PCH - 44C
• SSD1 - 30C
• SSD2 - 29C

Room temperature is 22.1C.

Of course I do not know yet, how this setup will perform in summer time, when temperatures in room might reach 30-40C, but I’m sure it will be just fine.

Loving fanless setup from minute I turned PC ON for first time, it just felt so natural, don’t know how I could cope with noise for all these years. For me “silent fan” or “barely audible fan” does not suffice any more. I want 0db noise. And CR-95C Copper gives you exactly that!

Worth mentioning is that this cooler is BIG. It will probably block use of first PCI-E x16 slot in your mobo. For Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD5H which I used, it does not cover it, but its quite close, so I don’t know will it be possible to use dedicated videocard in pci-e x16 slot, but I was expecting this and so far I use built-in intel onboard graphics of cpu which are fine for my needs.

Other thing worth mentioning is that mounting this cooler on Intel cpu systems will require some patience due to fact that holes on cooler for bolting it to motherboard is not round (perhaps its done for better compatibility), you will understand this if you mount this cooler yourself. For me it took probably 20-30minutes to set it up.

My CPU idles around the 35 degrees in a fully passive enviroment (albeit no dedicated GPU). Mounting was rather difficult, but this is a solid product.

I use an i7 Haswell processor for running protools audio software and Reason (often at the same time). In use for recording, mixing down and synthesising using multiple software instruments and many tracks I haven’t seen the temperature get above 54C. Stress testing using Prime95 at its most extreme setting it varied between 77 - 82 C. Stopping the stress test saw an almost immediate fall to 60 and after a few minutes back to idle at about 40 C.

What can I say really? A real step forward especially if you are running recording software…

Does the job, keeps Intel i7-4770K CPU temperature below 95 C. This may seem too steep, but what’s really important it prevents temperature hitting the Tj_max, at 100% all 4-core load. Air vents on the top side of the computer case are a must!

Easy to install, but make sure your RAM doesn’t exceed maximum height and that you have a case with vents in the top as required. Also note this will occlude the first PCI express slot on certain motherboards - especially mATX and fully loaded ATX motherboards with lots of slots. I was amazed at the sis of this thing and how much heat it puts out. On my core i7-3770 a 77w regular clocked processor the CPU temps come in at around 93c under load when using system stability tester - the Tj max temp for this proc is 105 - this seems to be a bit close. I forgot to see temp on stock fan so cannot compare sorry.