Just realized my buddy's $30 CPU cooler was quieter than my $150 AIO after he told me to check the pump curve in BIOS

He had a 20 minute conversation with me over Discord showing his fan speeds at 800 RPM while mine were pegged at 2000 because I never touched the settings, and now I feel dumb for not checking earlier - has anyone else had a cheap air cooler outperform their expensive liquid setup just from bad defaults?

2 comments

2 Comments

henry_kelly5428d ago

Used to think AIOs were just inherently better across the board. Figured the price tag meant better performance out of the box. Then I built a system for a friend with a $35 Hyper 212 and it was dead silent while my Kraken sounded like a vacuum cleaner. Checked my pump and fan curves in the BIOS and realized everything was set to run at max speed all the time. Dropped the pump to a fixed 40% and the fans to a quiet curve, now my AIO is actually quieter than his air cooler. Felt pretty stupid spending that much money just to have it configured wrong for six months.

the_val28d agoMost Upvoted

Had a similar thing with my old Corsair H100i. Realized after a year that the stock fan curve was just "MAX EVERYTHING" and I'd been cranking up my headphone volume to compensate.