Nofan CR-80EH Copper IcePipe 80W Fanless CPU Cooler Ultra

My first impression was that the cooler felt a little lightweight and flimsy. Previously I’ve used Zalman coolers which were solid copper and felt high quality. I’ve read elsewhere that the Nofan is actually just copper plated. The finish is glossy and not like real copper. When I removed the plastic protection film from the base, it left behind a mark that I couldn’t clean off (and cleaning with an IPA-soaked tissue appeared to leave fine scratches on the surface). I would also have liked a backplate so that it was possible to tighten the screws firmly, rather rely on “don’t overtighten” advice and hope it’s secure without bending the motherboard.

I’m pairing it with a 35W i5-10600T. (Previously I had a 65W Core 2 with Zalman cooler). However, the case is an old-style acoustically insulated one with little ventilation apart from the fan grille at the back. The power supply is at the top and has a low RPM fan. At idle, it seems fairly impressive, stabilising around 32°C (vs 37 in my old setup). It spikes up to around 45 under everyday tasks, then rapidly drops. The problem comes when I try a synthetic load across all 6 cores. It rapidly climbs right up to 85°C, at which point the processor throttles and it starts to drop. By extrapolation, I reckon it would level out at around 90. Interestingly, it makes little difference if I leave the side of the case off. I can’t test top ventilation in this case.

My solution is to use a rear exhaust fan, which my motherboard allows me to configure so that it is off most of the time. It depends on the curve I program, but with the fan starting above 60°C, I can keep it below 70. The performance of the cooler means even without a fan, it takes a few minutes to reach excessive temperatures, so there is plenty of time for the fan to start. It may be that in a case with a top grille and natural through ventilation, the cooler would perform perfectly. To be fair they do say this is recommended. On the other hand, I only have a 35W processor. I’m reasonably happy with the semi-passive setup as 99% of the time there is no need for a fan. I’ll have to see how it fares in the summer.

In summary, I felt the build quality could be better. Also, be prepared to use a case fan under load unless you have very good ventilation, and forget about high wattage CPUs. I read elsewhere that Nofan may have gone out of business, so I guess it’s a case of grab one while they are still in stock if you want to give fanless cooling a try.

This heatsink in copper is very good.

I put this heat sink in a Mini-ITX motherboard ASROCK H470. I keep the retention guide to keep the nofan a little upper than the DDR4 RAM.

My i3-10100 is around 35C without any fan mounted.

I recommend this product.

Coupled this one with Intel i7-4785T (35W TDP) in a completely fanless case.

Idle: 40C, full synthetic load: 60C.

Absolutely perfect.

Update: 2018-06-30: tried the same thing with i7-8700 (65W TDP) in a fanless case - no go. While idling, it looks good, but under load it quickly reaches 100C. Yes, with a rear fan it drops to 60C, but with NoFan - it can’t be done. Switched to i7-8700T (35W TDP) and yes, full synthetic load: 73C.

So, bottom line: if you want to go completely fanless, then, you have to go with T version of the CPU. Exactly the half - 40W of what is advertised. But, if you really want to cool a ~80W CPU, you will have to use case fans, which, in my view, completely defies the purpose.

- up to 40W totally fanless

- up to 80W with some case fans on

I coupled this with an Intel Core i5-4690T (i.e. low TDP CPU). The only reason I didn’t give it 5* is that I assembled it first as it came. Afterwards, I discovered by a circuitous browsing route that it should have been installed in a particular orientation - there’s a nifty animation for its big brother cooler now on the QPC website, and they put me right about that. It would have been easier if the instructions mentioned the orientation to start with (the thing is square, so it’s easy to get it wrong); am I being unfair?

The PC is completely fanless, and it’s surprising quite how noisy a HDD (WD Caviar Blue) now seems... But the main thing is that the PC runs cool even when doing relatively computing-intensive things. So, as long as you have a low thermal rating CPU, this thing works fine. It’s quite pretty through the case vents too, if that’s your thing.