New PC arrived, great but little mobo fan very loud + radiator damaged :(

[nfoote]

Hi Guys

My new PC arrived yesterday, it looks and runs great ... well almost GREAT!

First off its a i7-950 on a Rampage Extreme III with a GTX580 all in a Corsair 600T.

So far its going great for my work and running Black Ops awesomely, BUT just a couple of small complaints/questions;

First, I notice the standard heatsink on the Rampage Extreme III mobo was removed and replaced with the slightly larger optional one with the wee fan on it.
Picture here (not my actual mobo) http://hardview.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Asus-Rampage-III-Extreme-Cooler.jpg
The problem is this wee fella is VERY loud! I did a quick Google and found some people saying their's was very loud too, others saying theirs was silent! One guy suggested sitcking a finger in there and briefly stopping the fan ... so I did that, and WOW, silence! Compared to this little mobo fan the CPU+GPU+PSU+Case fans COMBINED are dead silent! Letting the fan go again and you can hear my PC from across a 5 metre room!

Question is, why was the little mobo fan installed in the first place? Is this standard practice or was there a reason specific to my order? Is my fan damaged or are all Rampage fans like that? Could I slow it down or remove it and put the normal fanless heatsink back on? I've got some temp monitoring stuff going, please see to following link as to system temps over a period of idle to load under Black Ops, let me know if you think these temps, particularly the high ones are too high or would be pushed too high with the fanless heatsink; http://img684.imageshack.us/i/temptr.jpg/

The second issue I have is the radiator on the CoolIT water cooler seems to have been damaged ever so slightly. Some of the fins are clearly bent. I imagine this won't have hardly any effect of its operation, if any at all, but its just not quite pleasing looking at the bent fins. I certainly hope the damage doesn't actually allow water to leak out! It hasn't thus far after 2 days of usage. Please see the following photo for the damage and again please comment as to my system temps and if you think the damage is having an effect or not; http://img840.imageshack.us/i/15122010088.jpg/

Other than those small issues the system is awesome, thanks!
Nick

 

[BAD SANTA]

First off, hey dude nice rig it's the exact same as mine exept I have a 5970.
Second the radiator for the coolit, pretty much every radiator in anything I have ever seen has bent fins, this includes a lot of cars and other stuff too. It's because they are so delicate, I have a couple on my coolit Eco that are it's nothing to actually worry about unless it's just aesthetics that are the concern, also you would defenatly know you had a leak if you did as that unit has a pump and it would come pouring out.
Thirdly, those fans are noisy I was thinking about taking mine off or at least switching it down in the bios but it is there for a reason and that's because the original piece that was in it's place apparently from what I have read got too hot so they came up with the new bit. I am still using it with new fan and new piece as I have not had any trouble exept noise, not a great answer so sorry but for more advice I would call pcs. O and one more thing the bent fins will not make any difference to performance at all as these work because of surface area and you still have the same surface area.

 

[nfoote]

Cheers for the reply mate!
Fair enough about the radiator, that sucks they get bent so easily.
As to the fan, its annoying they're so loud! I tried playing in the BIOS but got the wrong fan I think, might try again now. I wonder if anyone knows of any other high performance chipset coolers that are a LOT quieter (fanless?) that work well with the rampage?

 

[nfoote]

Regarding turning down the rpm on that chipset fan, I'm having a few issues. As you can see in the temperature image I linked earlier I have readings for just the two fans, CPU and Fan#3, this is reflected in the BIOS in the section Power->Hardware Monitor->Fan Speed Control, there are two fans enabled, CPU and Opt3.

The one labelled CPU I can control via software in windows, it generally runs at 900RPM and is quiet, if I turn on a turbo plan or something it jumps up to 100% at 1800RPM and is loud, thats fine.

But the one labelled Fan#3 or Opt3 seems to always run at 4300RPM and is I'm guessing the very loud 40mm chipset fan. If I go into BIOS can change its fan speed to User mode and set say 100% at 600C and 25% at 40oC I restart and immediately get warnings the CPU is too hot! BIOS is reading its jumped to over 80oC at idle!! Why is altering the Opt3 fan effecting the CPU? The % settings I showed above would surely have the fan at almost 100% anyways since the NB readings are normally 570C anyway but the monitoring software shows the Fan#3 drops to only 500RPM with those BIOS settings enabled!!

I really would like to sort this out, it would be great if I could turn that fan down quite a bit, I don't plan on doing any OCing just yet so the extra noise that fan is pumping out compared to all the other fans combined is just crazy!

 

[PCS]

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