I'm going to be doing a series of unboxings over the next little while here I've actually got an entire new
lineup of CPU coolers from Silent X so
this is their aphysio lineup I've got the compact which comes in a blue box I
have the extreme which comes in a green box I have the performance which comes
in a gray box and I have the low profile which comes in a red box so the very
first one that I'm going to do is going to be the Compact and the reason I'm
going to do the compact first is completely arbitrary I like the blue
color because I am wearing a blue shirt today so this is a quietest noise level
heat sink so that means it falls under their less than 18 D rated heat sink
category you can see that we have two 6 mm heat pipes that are heat pipe direct
touch so they directly interface with the processor core that means that you
get slightly better thermal performance but it is more expensive to manufacture
a heat sink that has the heat pipes directly contacting the CPU core with
optimize fan blade for the greatest air to noise ratio so they're using silent X
fans which they well should because this is a silent X heat sink and next we have
that they have a new Universal mounting system so that's going to be a big one
that we're going to look closely at is how solid is the new Universal mounting
system so here's the compatibility as well as the specifications I'll let you
have a close look at those so you can see the weight is actually quite low
which I would expect for a low profile rather for a uh a compact heat sink
because you don't want to compact heat sink that weighs a ton you've got the
ratings for the fan on there as well so let's go ahead and open up the box and
have a look at what we find inside so the first thing that I'm going to notice
here is that it is very compact this is a small heat sink so that means that you
can use it in a case that is very slim because it's not going to sit very far
away from the motherboard and you can also use it in a case where there's
you've got a fair bit of clearance from the CPU socket upward but you don't need
a ton because it does use an 80 mm fan
so let's go ahead and have a look at the back plate for their new Universal
mounting system all right so we got holes on here
oo that's nice and solid you can see they've actually shaped it as well see
this groove in here so they've shaped it in order to give it a little bit more
structural rigidity and you can see that they've got a plastic coating on the
back here so I can't actually put my finger into that Groove so that's to
keep it non-conductive when it's plastered to the back of a motherboard
so we've got 775 1156 13 66 holes am2
am3 holes K8 holes you've got holes for
pretty much everything you could want to make a hole in it to mount it to all
right next we have ooh a CPU fan speed
controller that's a pretty good value for a low-end heat sink you don't
usually expect to see that and this is a value heat sink I mean you're not going
to be shattering any performance barriers with this one that's not the
point of this product okay so in here we have our our AMD K8 am2 am2 plus am3
mounting hardware so you can see we've got a little adapter here that we
basically bolt onto the cooler and then we use the included screws to screw it
down okay I love that all of the mounting hardware here is made out of
solid metal pieces there isn't a single plastic piece of mounting hardware in
this entire kit so we've got okay yeah we've got rubber grommets to mount the
fan if we want uh noiseless fan mounting but that's it and that's perfectly
acceptable other than that we have bolt through okay we have thumb screws with
uh spring mounting so those are things that I really like to see and then we
have like no plastic nonsense uh we've got some included thermal compound this
is silent X brand thermal compound ooh uh greater than 30% silver content by
volume so that's a silver based thermal
compound here's our included fanspeed controller I've seen these in a number
of different uh heat sink Solutions so there's probably some OEM somewhere that
makes these they work really good they have a hole in here because there's a
little heat sink down there gives it some ventilation for the heat that it's going to kick off it's not very much
though so you just plug this into your motherboard you plug this into the fan
and then you control the fan speed fairly straightforward uh what I'll
probably do is plug this into my uh my test B is just sitting over there and
then we can hear how loud the fan is now this isn't a typical looking silent X
fan I was expecting to see one of their uh silvery looking fans but I guess
that's fine oh cool that's nice so they
actually include uh extra rubber mounts
because you can see the rubber mounts on here are already attached to a fan so
that means you can actually set this up as a sandwich this is kind of a neat
design I haven't seen something like this from Silent X before so first let's
have a look at our three pin fan connector right here that's it that's
all there really is to say about it it's three pins it's fan the fan is black and
white and you can see it's actually mounted with a bit of a gap here so the
way that these um that these rubber grommets work is they actually slide
into the heat sink right here and then you just push the fan onto it and pull
them through that's actually pretty clever I like it so you've got your two
heat pipes now this isn't going to be like I said it's not a high performance product so you've only got two 6 mil
heat pipes but you do have a quite a flat finish to the base it's all
machined very very nicely and I'll do the obligatory uh finger shot thing here
which doesn't actually tell us anything but everybody does it so I guess I might
as well so you got your Universal hold down on here okay actually oh no yeah oh
yeah this is universal so the AMD Clips go on to these holes and then they
expend extend it a little bit and then these are the Intel holes okay so you've
got a little heat sink built right over onto the heat pipes so that's going to
dissipate a little bit of heat but it's not going to get a ton of air flow even if you're running like a push pole setup
with the fan and then I really like the way they've laid out these heat um these
uh heat sink fins so what they've done is they've actually built in like kind
of a a different shape to every alternate fin so that gives you a bit of
a um I don't know how to describe this but
the way it looks to me is like what they're aiming for is more of a streamlined entrance for the air that's
going through where most of the air goes through which is directly under the fan
blades so you can see right under the fan blades that's where you have this
intersection where some of the fins are shaped out in a bulge like this and some
of them are shaped in an hourglass shape in like that so that's uh that looks
like it's by Design it's quite a dense fin Arrangement so what you're probably
going to want to do is invest in another $3 um and get a cheap fan or you can
invest a little bit more and get a nice silent fan throw that on the other side
you should have a nice performing little cooler for a relatively inexpensive cost
so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the aphysio compact heat
sink and don't forget to subscribe to my tech tips video blog