Sensible cooler for i7 4770K?

PerfectBlue97

I've been tasked with finding a sensible cooler for an i7 4770K running at 3.50 GHz with no overclocking. The case has lots of space, but has restricted airflow.

The owner fancied themselves as a bit of a gamer when they brought it, and shoved an Akasa Venom Voodoo on it. It sounds like a jet engine and is so big that it covers one of the RAM slots and makes another difficult to access. It also rules out RAM with a heat sink of any size.

They want to put in some more RAM and make it quieter, which means that it needs a sensible cooler.

Can anybody recommend something that's quieter and smaller. Or at least sits higher so that they can fit more memory underneath it.

It needs to be an air cooler, because the owner is an idiot (Hence putting such a big cooler on a K CPU but not overclocking it) and I don't trust them not to do something dumb with a water cooler.

EndlessWaves

Would twisting it 90° and potentially removing one fan solve the clearance issue? Many coolers are designed to be mounted in either orientation.

On the noise side, a biggish cooler like that shouldn't be noisy. Are the fans connected to the motherboard and the fan control enabled?

If you need a cooler with fans that are quiet even at full speed then that's a trickier ask.

PerfectBlue97

I think that it's OP. It's designed for an overclocked chipset, so when it throttles back it doesn't throttle far enough. It's a monster, and the bearings are probably warn as well which doesn't help.

The case has restricted airflow, so rotating it would make things worse by breaking up the front-to-back flow.

EndlessWaves

If the airflow is that restricted then putting it in a bottom to top orientation might even improve things as that's the natural orientation for convection.

The Akasa site lists the fans as going down to 600pm and 6.9dBA so they're definitely not going to be loud. The reviews also call it quiet, e.g.
Akasa Venom Voodoo CPU Cooler Review

They're fluid bearings, so they shouldn't have worn particularly quickly. Even after five years I'd be surprised if that's the sole cause of the noise.

What's the CPU temperature under load? Is it something ridiculously low like 65°C? That's be a sign that the fan control is too aggressive and needs to be changed to a quieter profile or set manually.

If it's simpler to get agreement on a change rather than tweaking the existing setup then a Tower cooler with 92mm fan would be the default choice, there are plenty to choose from around the £15 mark.

But it may not solve the noise issue if the fans are being run at high speeds. If it's being temperature controlled on an aggressive profile or a fixed percentage of the fan range it may be even more noisy, not less.

GingerRocky

are you not able to stick some 140 mm fans in the front to increase airflow and 1 exhaust. those coolers are good and reduce the speed will take the noise down and the fans at the front increase air coming in.  if you cannot get fans in the front, maybe a new case?

Kesuke

For Air Coolers the Coolermaster Hyper 212 has always been very popular. It's a decent size but it affords some clearance and at £32 is fairly priced (they also do a black version). Alternatively the BeQuiet ShadowRock 2 or BeQuiet PureRock Slim would be viable and are known for being reasonably quiet.