Asus "Fanless Design"

[anonymousvkfan]

I'm planning on building a new machine in the near future and am looking at the Asus AM2 motherboards. All of these motherboards have "fanless design." This confuses the crap out of me, because I have no idea how literally this phrase should be taken and/or what types of fans I need to purchase for the machine.

CPU Fan/Heatsink?
Case fans?

If anyone owns one of these fanless design boards (doesn't have to be AM2 socket), would you be willing to comment on how well the motherboard cooling performs?

I did searches here for "fanless design" and "passive cooling" but was unable to find anything relevant. I apologize if this has been addressed before.

Thanks.

 

[INM8]

Well i have an Asus A8N SlI Premium which is part of the "fanless" range. Basically it means that instead of having a chipset fan on your motherboard, you get a heatpipe which transports the heat up to a small radiator that relies on exhaust air from a cpu fan to keep it cool. So really, all they are doing is moving the heat to another located. My one seems to function fairly well (chipset is running at 25C atm) , but mark my words, you WILL need some active cooling blowing on that radiator to keep the chipset at acceptable temperatures. Mind you, i still think its better then having a chipset fan, because most chipset fans (especially the standard ones that come with motherboards) are noisy and they seem to fail fairly quickly too. Just make sure that when you are choosing a cpu cooler\heatsink, make sure you get one that either blows down or blows across the top of the radiator. Using the stock AMD cooler should work just fine, since they are all made to blow downwards.
You may understand better if you have a look at these two pictures:


http://www.ixbt.com/video2/images/nv41-2/asus-a8n-sli-scan-front.jpg

http://www.unitycorp.co.jp/images/im-pr.../im_a8n-sli_pre/a8n_sli_premium-2d.jpg

Notice that the first one has a small heatsink\fan on top of the chipset, and the second one has a heatpipe instead.

So as you can see it wouldnt be wise to take Asus's "fanless design" claims too literally. You should still install case fans and you most definitely need a cpu fan, the only thing you dont need anyone is a chipset fan . Maybe Asus should start calling it "Fanless Chipset Design".

 

[Navid]

The adjective "fanless" describes the motherboard only. It does not necessarily describe your PC or even the CPU, which will be installed on the motherboard. Many motherboards come with a fan for cooling the chipset. A fanless motherboard, cools the chipset passively.

 

[Operandi]

Like others have said "fan less" refers to the motherboard chipset only. I don't mean to down play it though because active chipset cooling really dose suck; its loud and many seem to cheap out with unreliable fans.

So you will still need case and CPU fans; having a CPU HS/F that blows air towards the motherboard helps but it certainly isn't required.

 

[anonymousvkfan]

Thanks guys. You completely answered my question. I will probably opt to purchase a separate CPU fan in the interest of noise (vs the stock fan), and I will look to see that it blows down.

This board rocks.

 

[Shadowknight]

In my system my temps on my motherboard are fine, and that's using a fanless Ninja, a case fan at 650rpm, and a VGA card which uses a Zalman heatpipe with an undervolted 92mm Nexus cooling it off - you don't really need that much system airflow to keep your fanless chipset cooler frosty.