The Silentat0r

The Silentator is packaged in a neutral blue box with a circular window on the front allowing you to see what you’re buying. All round the outsides are pictures of the cooler from different angles.

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The Silentator is sent with only one of the three different brackets required from the various CPU sockets out there. Fortunately, being a reviewer I get all three, allowing me to mount this on either a LGA 775, AM2 or K8 (754, 939, 940) motherboard. A paying customer has to make the choice before purchasing.

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Also included in the box, is a screwdriver, the manual, two rubber strips, two additional fan clips, heatpaste, a 3 pin to molex converter, and a fan speed controller. All in all it’s not a bad package.

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The cooler itself is the standard tower type, with three U-shaped heatpipes with the apex making contact with the interface pad. This essentially means that the cooler has six heatpipes which sends the heat quickly to all of the coolers 37 aluminium fins.

Installed as standard, including anti-vibration rubber strips, is a SWiF-1202 120mm fan. The additional rubber strips and clips allows you to have another fan on the other side working in tandem with this fan. The current fan has a fairly long power cable, which is sleaved in a black cladding, and terminates in a 3 pin motherboard header type plug. If you find that you are fresh out of these, then the included 3 pin to molex converter will make you smile.

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Looking at the heatpipes, it’s obvious that this cooler has been sitting in a slightly damp warehouse for a while and there is a small amount of oxidisation occurring where the heatpipes meet the interface pad. This however won’t lower the cooling power of the Silentator. These heatpipes run directly up through the fins and are clamped at the top.

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After pealing off the usual ‘remove before you install’ sticker from the base, you can see that there is more discolouring of the copper, and there are obvious machine marks. Wouldn’t have been nice to see my reflection, but the base is flat and isn’t as bad as some coolers I’ve seen in the past.

As this cooler exceeds the recommended weight that should be used with a motherboard, the Silentator uses its own backplate which will mean that your motherboard will have to be removed during installation. To make sure that compatibility is as wide as possible, you can turn this cooler by 90° allowing you to avoid surface mobo components or nearby RAM modules. As with most coolers these days, the Silentator is strapped into place using spring screws.

For a reasonably budget cooler, its surprising that this CPU chiller comes with its very own fan controller. It’s a simple PCI bracket affair, but will do the trick. Simply put, it’s a variable resistor that sits between the fan and motherboard header limiting the amount of voltage that the fan is allowed. With this installed, you can control the fan from between 14 (32CFM) and 24dBA (53CFM).