Verdict: For those who desire a quiet life

The Hyper 48 looks as though it should be incredibly loud and have a very aggressive fan, as there's a fan grille to prevent your hands looking as though they've been involved in a finger-wrestling contest with Freddy Krueger.

However, when we switched on the PC with the Hyper 48 installed we were pleasantly surprised. The 92mm fan spins at a mere 1,400rpm, so unless you have the hearing of particularly cunning fox, to all intents and purposes it's silent. To help the cooling process, the Hyper 48 has been made from pure copper interlaced with four u-shaped heatpipes.

Installing the Hyper 48 is fairly straightforward, although you have to remove the motherboard from the case in order to fit the mounting bracket. Then all you have to do is screw a plastic frame into the bracket, and clip the heatsink in place with two metal arms. On an Athlon 64 the Hyper 48 proved to be very effective, but on our LGA775 test rig its cooling performance only surpassed that of the reference Intel HSF by 1ûC.

While the Hyper 48 isn't ideal for heavily overclocked CPUs, it's incredibly quiet, especially for an LGA775-compatible design. So if silence is more important to you than GHz then it's worth a look.

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