Loud Corsair H55

[king_solom0n]

I installed the H55 into my desktop last night. Everything works fine except the fan is really loud. According to the bios, the fan is running at 100%. I'm pretty sure this has something to do with me plugging the 3 pin connector from the h55 into the 4 pin connection for the cpu fan on the motherboard.

Is there any way to have the OS automatically control the fan speed? Or do I have to get quieter fans or some sort of adaper? Motherboard is an Asus p8z68-v/gen3.

 

[dma0991]

Corsair stock fans can be notoriously loud and it has nothing to do with plugging a 3 pin to a 4 pin. At BIOS, the system isn't exactly idle, so it might show the maximum speed. Try using SpeedFan or Asus FAN Xpert utility to manage fan speed.

 

[Ichinisan]

The H55 has no good reason to exist. It's pretty-much the same surface area as any other heatsink with a 120mm fan, so it would have similar cooling performance. Putting the fan closer to the outside just makes the whole thing louder.

I just use a case with a 200mm fan at the top that blows up/out. I use a normal heatsink with a 120mm fan blowing up. Heat naturally rises, so I set both fans to their lowest speed.

The H55 won't help you increase cooling performance or reduce noise versus a typical 120mm HSF. I do think there is some merit to the one with the bigger radiator that takes 2x 120mm fans. If I had that one, I would find a case that can mount the radiator to the top so I could use slow/quiet fans that blow up / out of the system.

 

[coffeejunkee]

I'm pretty sure this has something to do with me plugging the 3 pin connector from the h55 into the 4 pin connection for the cpu fan on the motherboard.

Correct, Asus motherboards (at least the recent ones) can only control 4-pin pwm fans from the cpu fan header.

You can either buy a pwm fan or connect the H55 fan to a casefanheader and then control its speed using Speedfan.

 

[king_solom0n]

Thanks for the help guys. I ended up just going to Microcenter and buying corsair's sp120 fan. It's running so much quieter and temps are down a couple of degrees.

Update: The fans helped but there was still some noise coming from the h55 itself so I'm going to return it. I'm back to air cooling till I can afford to get a custom loop. I just ordered the Thermalright True Spirit 140. Hopefully it fits inside a Fractal Design R4 and serves me better.