I'm out of touch with the cooler market, and am going to be needing an HSF for a mid-range Intel Quad, probably 9400 or 9400S.
I'll pay what ever I need to pay, but don't want to spend more than I need without good reason.
The motherboard will probably be Asus, perhaps P5Q Pro, or Deluxe. I want something reasonably easy to mount, preferably sturdy and as it's a new build, mounting before installing the mobo isn't a problem. Oh, and access to all RAM sockets must be maintained, because I may well up the memory at some point from the initial 4GB.
Noise levels? Pretty quiet please. Absolutely silent isn't necessary but as close to it as reasonably practical would be nice.
Finally, while I may tweak the speed settings a bit if I can gain a decent overclock for minimal effort and no loss in system stability, I am not interested in clocking extremes, or for the same of getting every last jot of speed. If necessary, I'll run the whole thing at stock. So I might tweak, by serious overclocking isn't of ANY interest to me.
I;ve been looking at the obvious contenders, such as Ultra 120, s1283, Scythe etc., but I'm so out of touch I really don't know how any of these perform, how hard (relative to each other) they are to fit or even whether they are all overkill for my needs. If I need to spend £30 0r so, fine, but if I can satisfactorily spend half that, so much the better.
Oh, and I don't care what it looks like or about bragging rights. I want something of decent quality, but functional, not an engineering design fashion statement in copper. If I need a fancy-looking contraption to do the job, so be it, but I'm not interested in spending a single penny because of appearance.
So .... :-
- which cooler?
- which fan?
Thanks in advance.