Cooler Master Seidon 240M and 12 More Coolers: The Retest and Mega-Roundup
by Dustin Sklavos on April 26, 2013 6:01 AM ESTAbsolute Performance
We've taken a look at the coolers at their lowest settings, now let's see how things turn around when we run them at the highest settings available. This is the point where the closed loop coolers are going to more aggressively dominate the quieter air coolers.
Sure enough, it's actually an even split. At full bore, the liquid coolers are at the top of the list while the air coolers, engineered primarily for silence, are at the bottom. The noise levels are much more telling.
Outside of the inefficient SilverStone HE-01, the air coolers are quietest under load. Again, though, the Swiftech H220 is worth mentioning. While its absolute thermal performance left something to be desired compared to the smaller and theoretically inferior NZXT Kraken X40, the Kraken X40 has to run its fans a lot harder to hit those thermals.
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balazer - Sunday, January 26, 2020 - link
I believe these noise measurements are flawed. Some of these air coolers should be much quieter on an idle system with PWM than at 100%, but the measurements show them to be within 1 dB of the same cooler at 100%. And quite a few of the different coolers are all listed at the same 30 dB. It suggests the ambient room noise and/or noise from other components in the system is around 30 dB whereas some of the coolers can be quite a bit quieter than that, thus making all of the measurements around 30 dB suspect. Also it wasn't mentioned whether the noise measurements were A-weighted or not. (To be useful they probably should be)balazer - Sunday, January 26, 2020 - link
Or maybe the noise measurement device has a high noise floor.