SilenX Effizio Compact Dual Heatpipe Silent CPU Heatsink Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,550 words · ~7 min read
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I'm going to be doing a series of unboxings over the next little while here I've actually got an entire new
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lineup of CPU coolers from Silent X so
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this is their aphysio lineup I've got the compact which comes in a blue box I
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have the extreme which comes in a green box I have the performance which comes
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in a gray box and I have the low profile which comes in a red box so the very
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first one that I'm going to do is going to be the Compact and the reason I'm
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going to do the compact first is completely arbitrary I like the blue
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color because I am wearing a blue shirt today so this is a quietest noise level
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heat sink so that means it falls under their less than 18 D rated heat sink
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category you can see that we have two 6 mm heat pipes that are heat pipe direct
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touch so they directly interface with the processor core that means that you
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get slightly better thermal performance but it is more expensive to manufacture
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a heat sink that has the heat pipes directly contacting the CPU core with
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optimize fan blade for the greatest air to noise ratio so they're using silent X
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fans which they well should because this is a silent X heat sink and next we have
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that they have a new Universal mounting system so that's going to be a big one
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that we're going to look closely at is how solid is the new Universal mounting
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system so here's the compatibility as well as the specifications I'll let you
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have a close look at those so you can see the weight is actually quite low
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which I would expect for a low profile rather for a uh a compact heat sink
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because you don't want to compact heat sink that weighs a ton you've got the
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ratings for the fan on there as well so let's go ahead and open up the box and
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have a look at what we find inside so the first thing that I'm going to notice
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here is that it is very compact this is a small heat sink so that means that you
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can use it in a case that is very slim because it's not going to sit very far
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away from the motherboard and you can also use it in a case where there's
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you've got a fair bit of clearance from the CPU socket upward but you don't need
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a ton because it does use an 80 mm fan
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so let's go ahead and have a look at the back plate for their new Universal
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mounting system all right so we got holes on here
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oo that's nice and solid you can see they've actually shaped it as well see
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this groove in here so they've shaped it in order to give it a little bit more
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structural rigidity and you can see that they've got a plastic coating on the
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back here so I can't actually put my finger into that Groove so that's to
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keep it non-conductive when it's plastered to the back of a motherboard
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so we've got 775 1156 13 66 holes am2
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am3 holes K8 holes you've got holes for
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pretty much everything you could want to make a hole in it to mount it to all
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right next we have ooh a CPU fan speed
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controller that's a pretty good value for a low-end heat sink you don't
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usually expect to see that and this is a value heat sink I mean you're not going
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to be shattering any performance barriers with this one that's not the
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point of this product okay so in here we have our our AMD K8 am2 am2 plus am3
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mounting hardware so you can see we've got a little adapter here that we
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basically bolt onto the cooler and then we use the included screws to screw it
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down okay I love that all of the mounting hardware here is made out of
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solid metal pieces there isn't a single plastic piece of mounting hardware in
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this entire kit so we've got okay yeah we've got rubber grommets to mount the
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fan if we want uh noiseless fan mounting but that's it and that's perfectly
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acceptable other than that we have bolt through okay we have thumb screws with
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uh spring mounting so those are things that I really like to see and then we
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have like no plastic nonsense uh we've got some included thermal compound this
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is silent X brand thermal compound ooh uh greater than 30% silver content by
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volume so that's a silver based thermal
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compound here's our included fanspeed controller I've seen these in a number
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of different uh heat sink Solutions so there's probably some OEM somewhere that
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makes these they work really good they have a hole in here because there's a
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little heat sink down there gives it some ventilation for the heat that it's going to kick off it's not very much
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though so you just plug this into your motherboard you plug this into the fan
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and then you control the fan speed fairly straightforward uh what I'll
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probably do is plug this into my uh my test B is just sitting over there and
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then we can hear how loud the fan is now this isn't a typical looking silent X
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fan I was expecting to see one of their uh silvery looking fans but I guess
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that's fine oh cool that's nice so they
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actually include uh extra rubber mounts
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because you can see the rubber mounts on here are already attached to a fan so
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that means you can actually set this up as a sandwich this is kind of a neat
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design I haven't seen something like this from Silent X before so first let's
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have a look at our three pin fan connector right here that's it that's
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all there really is to say about it it's three pins it's fan the fan is black and
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white and you can see it's actually mounted with a bit of a gap here so the
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way that these um that these rubber grommets work is they actually slide
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into the heat sink right here and then you just push the fan onto it and pull
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them through that's actually pretty clever I like it so you've got your two
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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
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heat pipes but you do have a quite a flat finish to the base it's all
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machined very very nicely and I'll do the obligatory uh finger shot thing here
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which doesn't actually tell us anything but everybody does it so I guess I might
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as well so you got your Universal hold down on here okay actually oh no yeah oh
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yeah this is universal so the AMD Clips go on to these holes and then they
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expend extend it a little bit and then these are the Intel holes okay so you've
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got a little heat sink built right over onto the heat pipes so that's going to
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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
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with the fan and then I really like the way they've laid out these heat um these
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uh heat sink fins so what they've done is they've actually built in like kind
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of a a different shape to every alternate fin so that gives you a bit of
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a um I don't know how to describe this but
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the way it looks to me is like what they're aiming for is more of a streamlined entrance for the air that's
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going through where most of the air goes through which is directly under the fan
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blades so you can see right under the fan blades that's where you have this
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intersection where some of the fins are shaped out in a bulge like this and some
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of them are shaped in an hourglass shape in like that so that's uh that looks
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like it's by Design it's quite a dense fin Arrangement so what you're probably
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going to want to do is invest in another $3 um and get a cheap fan or you can
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invest a little bit more and get a nice silent fan throw that on the other side
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you should have a nice performing little cooler for a relatively inexpensive cost
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so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the aphysio compact heat
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sink and don't forget to subscribe to my tech tips video blog