Noise Level

The Eliminator has three operating modes: low, medium and high, which refer to the levels of cooling. In practice, these three modes affect the speed of the exhaust fan mounted to the back of the unit and thus the amount of noise generated by the cooler. One of the virtues of the NZXT Lexa I’m using is that all of the case fans are very, very quiet; with most of the fans removed to fit the Eliminator into the case, I had an excellent opportunity to observe how much noise my new cooling solution exhibited.

The results were a little surprising: although all three modes put out enough noise at startup to make you think you had placed your PC inside a wind tunnel, low really does mean low – a whisper quiet that was actually quieter than my previous fan configuration. Medium puts out an acceptable level of noise, while high reverts back to wind tunnel conditions, roaring (in a totally unacceptable fashion) above the explosions in Battlefield 2142. I have a feeling that if you need to run the Eliminator on high, you’re living in the middle of the desert with no air conditioning – or your CPU is in another room where the noise won’t bother you.

On a related note, there’s one thing that bothers me about these speed settings: they’re controlled by a switch on the hardware. Want to go from medium (the stock setting) to high once you’ve finishing the installation? You’ll be cracking open that box again. I’m surprised CoolIt doesn’t offer some sort of hardware integration with the case fan headers on the motherboard that you could then control through the BIOS or, even better, that auto adjusted the fan speed based on heat conditions, like many power supply fans do.