With the SilverWind attached to our Intel Micro-ATX
motherboard it almost overwhelms it. We checked to make sure we had
clear in the case we will be testing the heatsink. Look for the case
review early next week. Our fear was the heatsink might have problems
with the power supply we were using and that turned out to be not the case
as we had a 1/2" to spare for space.
Even with some tall close to the socket capacitors the
SilverWind fit perfectly and it never touched a single component on the
motherboard.
Testing
To Test the AeroCool SilverWind we assembled our components
and ran the system through a series of pretty brutal stress-tests. The
list of our test-bed is as follows:
We began our tests by running a copy Ultra-X's Winstress off
of our pin-drive and for the second helping we ran a copy of Prime in the
background. We then recorded the temperature of both the processor and
system at idle and under full load. As a comparison we ran these identical
tests using the stock Intel heatsink. Here are the results we obtained.
System/Max RPM
IDLE
LOAD
SilverWind HS
29
34
Intel Stock HS
32
37
CPU/Max RPM
IDLE
LOAD
SilverWind
HS
33
50
Intel Stock
HS
35
64
CPU/Min RPM
IDLE
LOAD
SilverWind HS
35
58
Intel
Stock HS
39
throttle
Conclusion
The AeroCool SilverWind proved to very nice substitute for
the stock Intel heatsink and with the variable speed controller you have the
option of having some serious air movement or reduce down to the point of being
barely audible. While this heatsink might be out of it's league if used
for overclocking, it will work perfectly in a standard installation where it
will do a respectable job and add a touch of class to your motherboard.
