Arctic Cooling ATI and NV Silencers - Testing
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I tested the NV Silencer 5 in two ways: by looking at how well it cooled the 6800 and by how much further it enabled me to overclock the 6800. I used the 6800's thermal monitoring tool to read GPU core temperature. This is certainly not the best method of reading temperatures, so don't be shocked if the results aren't what you expected. I used Rthdribl and ATITool to simulate load.
Idle
| GPU Core (°C) | Ambient (°C) | Rise Above Ambient (°C) |
| Reference | 61 | 42 | 19 |
| NV Sil. 5 | 55 | 37 | 18 |
Load
| GPU Core (°C) | Ambient (°C) | Rise Above Ambient (°C) |
| Reference | 67 | 44 | 23 |
| NV Sil. 5 | 63 | 43 | 20 |
Looking at the results, it seems that the NV Silencer 5, as big of a heatsink and fan that it is, only drops temperatures by about 5 °C both at load and idle. However, the accuracy of the thermal sensor is unknown. Relatively speaking, if you consider the rise above ambient data, the NV Silencer 5 is consistently lower than the stock cooler showing that its copper base and aluminum fins are cooling better than the reference aluminum extrusion. And since the NV Silencer dumps hot air outside of the computer case, ambient temperature will always be lower with the Silencer than with the reference cooler assuming room temperature is the same. A lower ambient temperature and lower rise above ambient translates into a better cooler.
In terms of overclocking, I was able to push the 6800 core 25 MHz more, stepping the core overclock from 350 to 375 MHz. Memory overclocking did not fair any better or worse with the NV Silencer 5, it remained at 854 MHz. I used the same tools I used to simulate load to test overclocking stability. In a 3GHz system with 1GB DDR memory, the extra 25 MHz on the 6800 core enabled me to squeeze past 10K in 3DMark 2003.
Noise wise, the NV Silencer 5 was quieter than the reference cooler. The reference cooler has a slight whine to it whereas the Silencer spins very slowly and any noise it makes is hidden by hard disk spinning and other fans in the computer.
Next: Conclusion >>
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