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The package contained a pretty little sticker to slap on whatever your
overclocked heart desires- car, computer chassis, or an annoying
siblings forehead while they sleep. The glue on the sticker is very
sticky, so be careful on that last one! Think duct tape. Also in
the package; installation instructions, a small tube of Silicon
Oxide thermal grease, and the second slot exhaust vent. The last to be
removed from the package is the cooler itself which has the mounting hardware already
attached.
The
instructions for installing the cooler were, for the most part, clear and
understandable. The first thing that I noticed when examining the cooler
was that it doesn’t make use of thermal pads for cooling the RAM,
but instead uses little copper plates that were soldered onto the large
copper base in the proper locations. I’m inclined to say I would have
rather had a high quality thermal pad between the base and the RAM
rather than the copper risers, as the copper risers do not make contact
with the ram until you get down to some serious tightening. I will
explain more on the issue later.
The copper
base that is to make contact with the GPU core is a simple one. The
edges of the base are curved up in the corners. There is also a raised
center line around the edge which leads me to believe that instead of
being cut out of a block, that the base was stamped out of a large 1/4
inch sheet of copper. The final sanding on the base to make it smooth is
somewhat poor. With a homemade jig and some of the proper sandpaper and
tools, you might achieve better cooling.
Skiving,
which is the common process used on high-end copper and aluminum
heatsinks, is a process where the fins are milled out of a single copper
block. The fins are actually part of the block itself. Unfortunately,
this isn’t the case with the NV5 Silencer. The fins are soldered onto
the copper base, similar to that of the AMD Athlon 64 stock heatsinks.
While this doesn’t effect heat dissipation, it may affect heat transfer
from the core of the processor to the fins of the heatsink. While not
major, it is a nice feature that would be welcome in future revisions of
the cooler.
I will be
using a BFG 6800 OC for this review. I went out and purchased this card
no more than 10 seconds before Scott asked me if I had a video card
capable of using this cooler. Destiny unites!
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