So I've tried to make it quiet, but the fan makes a high-pitched sound not unlike coil-whine. I double-checked, it's the fan. Even at 20% duty cycle (1200rpm) it still makes this sound. That's just annoying.
At idle it's about 35-40°C, when I open Firefox, it shoots over 50°C in a second, during the first minute after logging in I've seen peaks of 63°C. Just loading a single core of the dual-core with Prime95 raises the temperature over 70°C within a minute with the fan speed around 2500rpm.
I caved and ordered the Noctua NH-L9i which seems a better choice with the most mass (420g) vs Zalman CNPS2X (83g) vs Scythe Kozuti (250g) vs Alpenföhn (250g). Also the Noctua has undoubtibly the better quality fan and build quality.
Pictures will be updated in this post within the hour.
The box.
The contents.
The cooler.
Apparently they're afraid something might scratch the surface... Notice the crud on the protective plastic.
Looks quite good quality-wise !
Yep, still lookin' good !
Euhm, not looking good. I've seen vinyl records have less of a story to tell. The thermal paste will have to work overtime for this !
Not perfectly parallel but better than most moderately priced heatsinks I've handled.
PWM is nice, although the minimum duty cycle isn't very low for this fan.
Mounting bracket attached. On Intel you need to have access to the back of the motherboard, for the Chopin case this means removing the motherboard. Mind you, this is usually the case, unless pushpins are used. One of the AMD brackets didn't have the countersunk tapping, QC issue.
Installation with the heatpipe ends pointing to the upper side of the board, you can see the VLP RAM sticks. It barely extends a millimeter over the board's edge, no problem for fitment in the Chopin.
Respecting the keep-out zone.
Just barely cleaing the VRM heatsink but this picture is to illustrate the height (without fan), it seems less than 5mm from the top of the PS2/USB rear I/O sockets (tallest one).
Fan mounted later on, this was very hard to do when it's so close to the side, I recommend attaching the before placing the board inside the case. It sticks about 5mm over the edge of the case, luckily the Chopin has a protruding side panel.
Though still a close fit.