Cooler

A good cooler is worth it if you're going to overclock, but otherwise it's not. With your CPU, I'd stay with the stock cooler.

A water cooling system is too expensive, it requires regular maintenance, and it would be a huge waste of money for the i5-3330. Intel's stock cooler is more than enough for it. The only time water cooling is worth the investment is if you want to do some extreme overclocking.

paulpicks21 said:

TwoCables said:

A good cooler is worth it if you're going to overclock, but otherwise it's not. With your CPU, I'd stay with the stock cooler.

A water cooling system is too expensive, it requires regular maintenance, and it would be a huge waste of money for the i5-3330. Intel's stock cooler is more than enough for it. The only time water cooling is worth the investment is if you want to do some extreme overclocking.

Closed loop water coolers require no maintenance,

Oh. You're talking about those kind of water coolers. Still, he has the i5-3330. So, he won't be overclocking and therefore any aftermarket cooling is a waste of money unless his stock cooler is defective.

He might have air conditioning.

Dude said:

Monday after work I am going to grab one of these

COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 EVO RR-212E-20PK-R2 Continuous Direct Contact 120mm Sleeve CPU Cooler Compatible with latest Intel 2011/1366/1155 and AMD FM1/FM2/AM3+ - Newegg.com

what do you think, have a better recommendation? I work about five miles fro Fry's so I will grab it instead of using newegg

I need to approach this a different way...

What has inspired you to look into aftermarket cooling?

If you plan on upgrading your CPU to something you can OC with, then you'll definitely need a new cooler as the stock Intel is garbage at anything other than stock-ish speeds. A closed loop water cooling system will not only look nicer in your rig, it will put less strain on your motherboard, and arguably is quieter while doing a better job at cooling. That being said, the CoolerMaster 212 Evo is probably one of the best CPU coolers you can buy in the sub-$50 range. With good thermal paste, it should take you to over 4GHz........on a K series CPU that is.