Arctic-Cooling ATI Silencer 1

Arctic-Cooling ATI Silencer 1

Introduction: Ever wanted a way to silence that small noisy fan on the video card without paying a fortune? Well here you have it, The Arctic-Cooling VGA Silencer 1.

Packaging: The product arrived in perfect condition and was very well protected with packing peanuts. This product itself was packaged in a molded plastic container that showed all it’s specifications and other features.

Contents:
Cooler itself
Thermal interface material
Arctic Cooling Casebadge
Specifications:
Fan: 72 mm
Overall Dimensions: 218.5 x 100 x 34.5 mm
Rated Fan Speed: 1500 RPM
Bearing: ARCTIC Ceramic Bearing
Noise Level: 0.5 Sone(measure of loudness, approximately between 20-25 dBA)
Weight: 204g

Outlook, Installation, and Testing The cooler is an improvement on the first versions of the Arctic VGA Silencers with a larger fan(72mm) and a copper base. This particular version of the ATI Silencer does not feature memory cooling, but the rest of the ATI Silencers do, which disappointed me. The cooler is also quite bulky and requires the sacrifice of the neighboring PCI slot, which may or may not setback some users. A plastic duct covers the whole of the card with the intent being to direct air through the aluminum fins and then exhaust it out the back of the case.
Going to installation, it was a breeze. The hardest part of the installation was to get off the stock ATI heatsink. The stock heatsink is usually affixed with 2 black spring tabs that must have the tiny hooks on the back side of the card pressed in then pulled out. It’s easy after the first one. After that, nothing stopped me. All that needed to be done was plugging in the power for the fan, applying the thermal grease, and fastening two small screws through the back of the card to hold the cooler on. I used the supplied Arctic Cooling thermal grease, which may or may not be the best for the job for the cooler, and spread a thin layer on top of the GPU for best contact.
The cooler was installed on an ATI 9800 Pro and temperatures were read directly over the core on the heatsink with a digital thermometer. To test this cooler multiple tests were run to make sure the temperatures were accurate. Directly when i booted up i saw a temperature drop of 5C and after running the tests I couldn’t get the temperatures over 35C. With the stock heatsink I got 34C idle and 40C under load. So we got a temperature drop of around 4C. The thing that really caught my attention was that its noise level I could barely hear it. I did not expect that it would be that much more silent.

Conclusion: I was very happy with this product. It gave me a decent temperature drop and it was very silent. I would say this is easily worth sacrificing a PCI slot and is well worth the price.

Pros:
Price
Noise level
Temperature Drop
Copper base
Larger than versus original Arctic Silencers

Cons:
Takes up one PCI slot
No memory cooling