Quietness of Retail HSF for i7 CPUS

[ALIAS]

i finally decided to upgrade to the i7 route and ordered the Core i7 950 last night along with a board and 6 gb of memory. Im used to having a fairly quiet PC and currently have a Zerotherm HSF with 120mm fan on the Core 2 Duo which runs fairly quiet. so i wanted to know if the stock intel HSF will be quiet enough for me or should i start looking into a quieter solution. any suggestions would be appreciated. thanks guys.

P.S.
i dont plan on overclocking or anything. my days of fine tinkering are gone.

[mikeymike]

I've built a few i7 systems (2x i7-920s and 1x i7-870), and while I consider myself to be overly-sensitive to system noise, I consider them to be pretty quiet systems, though not the quietest because all three systems had fan-cooled graphics cards.

I live in the UK though, and we have a pretty mild climate here (where I am I would expect 30C maximum outside and minimum about -5C).

It's been a while since I encountered any of the i7 systems, but IIRC they are about as loud as my PC spec (see sig for details). If I had an unexpected cash windfall, I would consider quietening my system down further by changing the GPU and CPU coolers, as I would like it to be quiet enough for people to say "is that computer actually switched on?", but the level of system noise from my current computer has never actually bothered me.

I'm interested to know how you get on with that board though, as it's on a PC quote for a customer at the moment.

[FuturePastNow]

It's probably quiet enough when idle, but under any sort of load, it will be loud.

[bobboobles]

Late post, but when it was doing any work, the stock fan on my i7-860 was pretty loud and annoyingly pitched. I swapped it for a Cooermaster Hyper 212+ and am much happier. I live in Georgia and it gets pretty hot in our house during the summer so the extra cooling doesn't hurt either.

[Voldenuit]

If you don't plan to overclock, a bit of undervolting will help lower those temps and fan rpms.