Arctic Cooling NV5 Silencer Rev 3
| Brand | Arctic Cooling |
COOLING
Arctic Cooling NV5 Silencer Revision 3 vs Gainward 6800GT Golden Sample Cooler
Come one, come all, and gather round the embers to share with me my first review experience. The suspect in question today is the Arctic Cooling NV5 Silencer Revision 3. This cooler is compatible with the previous 2 generations of nVIDIA’s flagship cards, the 6800’s and 7800’s (not sure about the 7900's), as they both share the same PCB (Printed Circuit Board).
A year and a half ago I bought a Gainward 6800GT Golden Sample, with the promise of running the thing at Ultra speeds stably (from 350/1000MHz to 400/1100MHz). While it was happy to go the distance, it did so at the expense of my ears; I swear Gainward secretly strapped a hairdryer to the cooler to get the cooling it needed.
So, it took me awhile to learn, but finally I splurged out a measly $37 and indulged my senses with a little silence (or at the very least no industrial deafness); which brings me to the NV5 Silencer. Here are a few specs:
Specs:
Fan: 72 mm
Overall Dimensions: 218.5 x 100 x 31 mm
Rated Fan Speed: 2000 RPM
Bearing: ARCTIC Ceramic Bearing
Noise Level: 0.9 Sone
Weight: 428 g
Warranty: 6 Years
A clever cooler, and used by ASUS for their T.O.P. performance cards, this two slot space monger utilises a copper base (a great conductor of heat), and aluminium heat fins (a great dissipater of heat) to collect the heat from the GPU, whereby a fan located towards the ‘back’ of the unit blows air over the heat sink and exhausts it out of your case. Therefore the purpose is not only to cool the GPU effectively, but also cool your case by pushing the warm air out of the case instead of recycling it inside. And, my favourite part, it does all of this at incredibly low noise levels.
Installation:
Arctic Cooling has incorporated their 2000rpm fan with a ceramic bearing, and is as quiet as the proverbial lubricated mouse smothered with Vaseline… ok ok maybe not that bad. But it’s probably the only fan I can’t hear in my case. It comes with a 6 year warranty to boot! So even if you wanted to throw your computer off the balcony in the next half decade, you’d still be covered! Well, at least the cooler is. Good news all round.
Installation was simple and a pleasure to boot! Taking the old cooler off was a breeze, however I had to modify the two-slot bracket of the old Gainward because this cooler requires the second slot for the exhaust. After an hour of cutting and polishing in preparation (see photos), I obtained the box later that day to realised Arctic Cooling had already thought of this and provided two slots with which I could have used instead. Why do I even bother sometimes? Oh well...
Off with the old, on with the new. All i needed to do was place the cooler on the card, screwing the four screws down on the supplied bracket, i tightened them all the way, applying pressure on opposite sides untill they were tight, or the bracket was parallel to the card.
The moment of truth: The old cooler (left) replaced with the old cooler (right). Shiny, isn't it?
Testing:
Loading up F.E.A.R., I ran the demo 3 times over and recorded the highest temperatures over the 3 runs. I had previously done this with the Gainward cooler, with fan speed at 25% (almost equivalent to the NV silencer – just a tad louder), and fan also at 100% (Did a helicopter just land in my back yard?). I also included ambient temps to see how the exhaust compared to the standard cooler.
First up was the standard clocks (350MHz core, 1000MHz RAM). A blistering 93C under load for the standard cooler on 25% RPM (don't try that at home, kids). Strapping on the earmuffs, the cooler at 100% performed quite reasonably (although not in the noise levels!), coming in at 68C, but the clear winner was the NV Silencer with 62C.
Now for the fun part. I turned the juice up a tad on the card, letting her show a bit more potential with clocks of 420MHz for the core and 1150MHz on the RAM. I'm not THAT crazy to run the stock cooling at 25%, so we are only comparing the two temps under load. Once again, the NV5 comes out on top, this time by 7C! Great improvement, even cooler than the standard cooler at normal clocks!
As an aside, i thought i'd measure the ambient temps on the card (just using Rivatuner's results). It turned out the standard cooler was a tad cooler at 100% than the NV5, however i'm not entirely sure how true these results are for the rest of the case, as it seemed my cooler by hand in my opinion (especially around the northbridge chipset). I'm not entirely sure where the ambient temp sensor is located, and this might have something to do with the result.
Conclusion
So there you have it. The $37 for the NV5 Silencer is a small price to pay for extemely effective cooling at near silent levels. I haven't compared this cooler to the standard 6800 series or 7800 series coolers, although i'm confident that this is both cooler and quieter than any other air solution i've come across to date. Well worth it and highly recommended.
