I'm looking to replace a stock cooler on an i5-6600 something that is as quiet as possible. It has to fit on a cramped (although thoughtfully designed) mini-ATX motherboard layout with a fairly normal 167mm headroom.
The only other consideration is price.
Looks don't matter, performance only matters as far as keeping an stock speed i5-6600 adequately cooled while being "silent".
What would you recommend?
noctua d15
I feel like Coolermaster's 212X is one of the most affordable and best performers while keeping things quiet. I've got liquid cooling in my pc and while that certainly does the job, the amount of noise involved in running the pump and fans is more than necessary (even when just idling in windows) compared with 212Xs even under some load.
Thanks guys: ended up going with a Deepcool Gammaxx 300 for $24 (MSY less than 10 in stock).
After reading reviews I would describe it as nothing special at all as far as cooling performance - though to be clear it's not bad either - but it features a 120mm fan spinning at 800 RPM and reviews put it at 20 - 30 dB noise. Quite a range lol but the ones I'd trust most (anandtech) have it at 28dB 1 metre away and the noise is nicely spread across the frequency range (equals it seems much quieter to the human ear than some other sounds recorded at 28dB).
Just edit the fan curve for the CPU fan so its spins slower than 800 unless temps get too high.
I got a Coolermaster Hyper 212X from MSY yesterday for $49. It is quite big however, 120x79x158mm but is keeping my i5 2500k nice and cool, o/c it to 4.3mhz runs BF1 beautifully.