Nofan IcePipe A43-H67 Silent PC review

Many PCs have arrived in the PC Pro Labs claiming to be silent, but despite seeing clever cooling and case modifications, we usually find a pesky fan or two somewhere to spoil the ambience. Not so with this one. Remember the name Nofan: set up by the founder of Zalman, its IcePipe A43-H67 Silent PC does things differently.

For starters, despite a full-fat Core i5-2500K processor it’s completely passively cooled, and the interior is dominated by the most ridiculous heatsink we’ve ever seen. The Nofan CR-100A cooler measures a massive 220mm across, and more closely resembles a hamster wheel than a piece of cooling equipment. Its donut shape houses scores of metal fins designed to dissipate heat from the Sandy Bridge processor.

The chassis has no case fans of its own, instead relying on a meshed front panel to allow air to drift inside. The 400W Nofan power supply is fanless too, instead being built around an aluminium heatsink. There’s understandably no graphics card – silence and gaming don’t tend to mix – with the integrated chip inside the processor taking charge of displays, and there’s no sign of a crunching hard disk, either. Instead, Nofan has installed Windows 7 Home Premium on a 120GB OCZ Vortex 2E SSD, which makes up in silence what it loses in capacity.

The result is startling. We’re used to hearing so-called quiet systems emit at least a low hum, so to put an ear to the side of the Nofan and hear absolutely nothing was something of a strange experience. It’s so quiet you’ll need to rely on the lights on the front to tell when it’s on; even with the side panel removed we could discern only the tiniest hint of the electric whine of the PSU’s capacitors.

That cooler does more than only eliminate noise. The Core i5-2500K idled at 36°C, and under full load from our benchmarks rose to a comfortable 75°C. That’s nowhere near its thermal limit, and lower than we see from many actively cooled processors. Power consumption was also excellent, with an idle power draw for the entire PC of only 33W. Under load, that rose to a mere 124W.