Overall it may depend on your tower and air flow.
Too many fans or too few or poor air flow can choke an air cooler. A good example:
I had a Cooler Master Cosmos 1000 years ago. I loved the look of the case, but overall the airflow in it was just awful, even after doing some mod work on it to add in two front intake fans. At the time I had a Phenom II x4 940 and I was working on OCing it. I was seeing lots of posts of people hitting 3.7-3.8 on a good chip before hitting thermal limit, but I was stuck at 3.6. I had tried three different air coolers, but I only remember what 2 of them were:
- Cooler Master Hyper 212
- Cooler Master V8
- ???? I can't remember what it was for the life of me
They all gave the same temps when OCing, I was hitting the thermal limit once I got up to 3.6 and voltage I was using was around 1.475 to hit that OC. I could push my OC further, but I had to crank the voltage to 1.5250 to keep the OC stable, but any sort of stress on the CPU pushed it past the thermal limit and she throttled hard. So I had to keep it at 1.475V to maintain 3.6GHz.
For the hell of it, I picked up a small radiator AIO (Corsair H50, if I remember correctly that was on sale at Best Buy for $30). That small AIO cooled better for my setup over any air cooler I tried. My overall temps dropped by almost 10C and I could drop the voltage down to 1.45 to maintain the 3.6 OC. I started messing with voltages and FSB and so on again and I was able to hit 3.71 with 1.5 voltage and still keep my CPU about 5 degrees under the thermal limit.
This was when I learned that air flow makes a big impact on your builds and how air cooler and AIO coolers can greatly impact your temps and performance.
Eventually I moved away from that tower to a Fractal Design Arc XL, it had much better cooling over the Cosmos 1000. I found that a Hyper 212+ worked great for my i5-4670k that I eventually picked up.
I ended up running into bad GPU sag (Zotac 980Ti AMP! Omega) eventually so I moved to my Cooler Master HAF XB Evo so the MB mounts parallel to the ground, instead of perpendicular like it does in most tower cases. This eliminated the GPU sag issue, but I was now limited to how tall of a cooler I could use so I transitioned back to an AIO (Corsair H110i) and I only have a total of 4 fans in my case now (had a total of 6 in my last tower, 8 if you count the two on the air cooler). Two on the radiator (pushing cool outside air through the radiator), the top 200mm exhaust and 1 - 120mm rear exhaust. Things stay cooler in this tower than they did in my Fractal Design case and now any computer I build I use this case (currently 3 different builds at home, all using the XB Evo).
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