Cooling: Silencer 4 ULTRA TCL - What you get
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Inside the plastic box you get the cooler, a case badge, and a thermal compound to use. The thermal compound should be thrown away immediately. They are not generally great to begin with, but this is the worst I have ever seen. It isn’t even spreadable. I would highly suggest buying some Arctic Silver.
When we take a closer look at the heatsink we see it is made out of aluminum. Aluminum isn’t the best material out of which to make a cooler. Most of the time it would suffice, but this cooler isn’t big and doesn’t have a powerful fan, so this may become a problem. There are 38 fins coming up from the base of the unit. The outer fins sport ridges on them for more surface area, but none of the inner ones have ridges.
The unique part of the cooler is the fan. This unit sports Arctic Cooling’s patented fan holder. This type of mounting allows the fan to spin fast while making less noise. The fan is mounted on four rubber supports to further silence the noise. When running, the fan sports nice blue LEDs. The power cable is braided, making the whole unit quite attractive. This is one of the biggest selling points of the cooler.
The bottom of the cooler is lapped decently. It feels smooth, but you can see the marks where there are ridges. If you spent the time and lapped it yourself you could see very minor differences. As you can see, it’s not too shiny either.
See this little gap in the fins? This is where the thermal probe is placed. The thermal probe senses the temperature, and changes the fan's speed as needed. I think this is where the problem of excess heat comes from. Arctic Cooling recommends using this probe instead of using a fan controller, whether an external 5.25 bay controller or software base controller.
The software based controller would use the temperature read out from the CPU. This is how hot the CPU is, which is all we care about. Arctic Cooling’s temperature probe senses the temperature of the heatsink with the fan blowing on it, and not of the CPU. This will naturally be lower, which slows down the fan and creates a higher CPU temperature.
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