Hi all,
I just bought myself a silverstone AR06 for my ITX build and thougt I would give it a quick review.
So first off a little about Silverstone Technology - They began life in May 2003 and produced their first power supplies the Strider ST360 and ST400 in the July and their first desktop chassis the Lascala LC01 in August of the same year.
Their first cooler the Nitrogon NT01 was produced the following year in 2004.
Ever since, Silverstone have been renowned for their innovation with their chassis design such as the Raven RV01 and have always produced reliable power supplies. They have expanded their business into other PC components such as fans, heat sinks and other accesories, one of which is the Silverstone AR06 low profile cooler that I am testing today.
So lets begin with the packaging:
The Heatsink comes in a very nice matt buff cardboard box that depicts the heatsink with some product information. The box is very sturdy and tactile, I know its just a box but goes a long way to make you feel that there is a quality product inside.
So lets open it up and have a look inside.
Opening th box reveals a contrasting soft touch foam enclosure and a thin protective cover of the same material covering the heatsink.
Once removed the eleven bladed 92mm fan can be seen in all its glory.
Also provided in the box is some thermal paste, Intel and AMD brackets , a bag containing a series of screws, nuts and washers and an installation guide booklet.
All very nice, but lets take a closer look at the fan and heatsink cooler:
The dimensions of the unit measure 58mm high, 92mm wide and 105mm long.
As previously mentioned it has a 11 bladed 92mm fan, this has a mostly braided 4 pin connector save for a few mms at the fan end.
The heatsink consists of four copper heat pipes with aluminium fins that form part of the heat sink base giving direct contact to your CPU for better heat transfer.
The whole assembly feels reassuringly solid and of some weight continuing the feeling that you are getting a quality product here.
So unto installation, this firstly involves feeding the provided screws through the required brackets and then attaching said backets to the heat sink, this was very straight forward with no complications.
I then proceeded to remove the stock cooler (sorry about the messy cable management here).
Once removed I could see how little room there was to play with when fitting a new heatsink in an ITX case, to aid me though I removed the graphics card and the two sticks of ram.
I did not worry too much though as I had already taken measurements from another stock intel cooler and compared it with the measurements I found online for this one, also images of this cooler can be seen on an itx board on Silverstones website so was not intending to struggle with fitting.
Alas, there was a struggle, and a few swear words... sorry neighbours.
As you can see by the following images there was only one possible way that this could be fitted, with the protruding heat pipes at the top, every other way had large obstructions of some kind:
Fair enough, I only need it to go on one way round. However, as you may be able to see feom the next image there is a capacitor on the top left side of the PCI slot which prevented the heatsink from being located properly.
This of course may not be an issue with all ITX boards but definately was with my MSI Z77 board.
I almost gave up on it, but managed to get a light shining underneath to see how much clearance i was off by, it was just mms.
Although it pained me to do so I only had two choices, either give up, or modify the heatsink fins slightly to enable it to fit.
I went with the second option. I was going to have to bend a number of the fins in sufficiently to enable room for the capacitor.
I was dubious about doing this as I did not want to damage the capacitor in the progress, but after a little bending of fins and a lot of fine measurements I managed to make enough room to clear it.
Now that I know I could fit the heatsink I applied the included thermal paste, and placed the heat sink into position.
It was now a relatively easy task of using the provided nuts and washers to secure into place.
Once in place it was much much prettier than the ugly stock one, also it can be seen how tight it is in there next to the ram and GPU.
It even gave me inspiration to tidy my cables.... a little anyway
So it looks nice but how did it perform?
Well, I did a couple of temperature readings using the stock cooler at idle and under load using prime 95.
Then did the same with the new cooler for comparison.
The system I used was as follows:
MSI Z77IA-E53 motherboard
Intel i5 3570K at stock settings (3.4ghz)
16GB Crucial ballistix elite 1866mhz ram
Palit GTX 970 GPU
InWin 901 ITX case with 120mm Corsair AF120 intake fan and 92mm Fractal Design R2 fan exhaust
Kingston SV300 240SSD
Hitachi 2.5inch 1TB HDD
Enermax Platimax 500w PSU
So here are the results:
Stock cooler idle:
Temerature after 20 minutes was 33C
Stock cooler under load:
This climbed up to 80C and sat there with fan spinning up to maximum.
Now for the Silverstone AR06
Idle temps:
a littlte higher at 39c but the fan was only running at 1069 rpm compared with the stock cooler which was running at 2071rpm.
Again 20 minutes of prime 95:
Wow what a difference, 55C! It did fluctuate slightly between 55 and 58C but a vast improvement over stock. This was with the fan at full speed and it was audible, though was a little quieter than the stock fan at full speed.
Unfortunately I do not have a decibel meter to give a more accurate level of noise, but most of you im guessing at some time would have heard a stock intel cooler at full speed, so in comparison the AR06 is definately quieter at full chat, though it is still audible.
Having said that, at around 1500rpm and below the fan is very quiet, and barely audible whilst still being able to dispense with heat a lot more efficiently than the stock fan at 100%.
To test this I did another run with prime 95 with the fan at just below 1500rpm:
56C this time, though did fluctuate as high as 64C but still much better than the stock fan, and much, much quieter at the lower fan speed.
(I shall try and get round to doing some overclocking temps later in the week, though just for the AR06, stock cooler just wont cut it)
So to a conclusion of sorts and awards.
Comparing pretty much any aftermarket cpu cooler with the intel stock cooler will always come out with the aftermarket one on top with its cooling performance.
Unfortunately I did not have another cooler to try for comparison, but I was not prepared for such a big difference in performance. Over 20C cooler was quite something, and to be 15 - 20c cooler on a reduced quite setting was the biggest win for me.
Along with that are the pretty aesthetics of this cooler, which was the main reason for my purchase in the first place, goes along way to giving this a very high award.
The pricing is also not too expensive, though maybe not the cheapest out there, coming in at just over £30 with delivery its not too bad, and with the quality product and packaging suggesting a rather higher retail price this too is a nice suprise.
Having said all of that, giving the issue I had with fitting this to an ITX motherboard, which is most likely where this product would end up, I have had to mark this down. to a Silver award.
Whether this would occur with other ITX boards I can not say, and it would be very difficult to judge from just taking a few measurements as I did. The only way to tell would be to have the cooler to test fit first, which for most people would mean purchasing and hoping.
If only other manufacturers would do similar origami style tenplates as Cryorig do for their coolers it would be far easier to check.
So Silver award for the pretty little blue and white cooler, for my build anyway.
Though, this may just be a gold award product for your build.... If it fits.
Thanks for taking the time to read this review.
Pete
