The Cooler Master highlights everything wrong with their approach to air cooling: they reuse an old design, rebrand it over and over again and hope for the best.Good review, I love his reaction to the Cooler Master.
With that being said, a lot of people are talking about how the ID-Cooling IS-47K needs to have its fan flipped for best performance. I'd agree but that would have also pushed its height past the limit for this roundup.
Another test that could be interesting (albeit very time consuming), is running the coolers not only noise normalised, but also using the same fan. A lot of people here use varying heatsinks with the fan that comes with the Noctua NH-l9.
Completely agree, anecdotal evidence isn't evidence. Needs to be empirical data following at least a slightly scientific process to be helpful.To expand on the above, it would also be cool to test some of the theories involving the NF a9 (25mm) as well as 120mm swaps, where total height is kept roughly equivalent, while the coolers and fans are swapped. There is somewhat of an ongoing debate whether swapping an NF a9 actually outperforms an NF-A9x14, and some tests I have seen show that the NF-A9x14 is superior despite being slimmer.
Whenever coolers are discussed it's guaranteed someone is saying how they swapped the fan and got some result, which is hard to verify outside of a controlled experiment. I suppose airflow/ducts contribute as well so one person's result on swapping a fan is not going to be true for all cases.
Thanks @SKYMTL for this great roundup!
I think by flipping the fan, people mean to use the fan as intake rather than exhaust, but still keep it beneath the heatsink. This is also a big deal on the Black Ridge so I would definitely advice to try both orientations if you are going to test that cooler.
Another test that could be interesting (albeit very time consuming), is running the coolers not only noise normalised, but also using the same fan. A lot of people here use varying heatsinks with the fan that comes with the Noctua NH-l9.
Very curious to see what you have in store for the second part!
To expand on the above, it would also be cool to test some of the theories involving the NF a9 (25mm) as well as 120mm swaps, where total height is kept roughly equivalent, while the coolers and fans are swapped. There is somewhat of an ongoing debate whether swapping an NF a9 actually outperforms an NF-A9x14, and some tests I have seen show that the NF-A9x14 is superior despite being slimmer.
Whenever coolers are discussed it's guaranteed someone is saying how they swapped the fan and got some result, which is hard to verify outside of a controlled experiment. I suppose airflow/ducts contribute as well so one person's result on swapping a fan is not going to be true for all cases.