Verdict: The tricky mounting mechanism means you have to be very dextrous to fit this HSF

The Thermaltake Silent Tower has almost exactly the same mounting mechanism as the Asus Star Ice, so it will fit all the current CPU sockets, including Socket A, Socket 478/754/939/940 and LGA775.

However, while the Star Ice is held in place by two standoffs, the Silent Tower is secured by a pair of nuts. And as any Asetek water-cooling kit owner will testify, nuts and bolts are not the easiest way to mount a heatsink or waterblock. Also, as the Silent Tower is so large, it's very difficult to screw the nuts in place without cutting your fingers on the components surrounding the processor socket, such as the Northbridge and VRM heatsinks.

However, once we had secured it in place the Silent Tower proved to be an excellent Athlon 64 HSF, cooling our overclocked Athlon 64 FX-55 to 15ûC lower than the reference AMD HSF. But on the overclocked 3.96GHz Pentium 4e it struggled to keep the CPU temperature within 1ûC of the reference Intel HSF. All the tests were carried out using the fixed-speed fan, which buzzes away at 2,500rpm.

There's no question that the Silent Tower is an excellent Athlon 64 cooler, but because of the awkward installation and irritating noise, we really can't recommend it.

• Cases - 21st November 2008
• Motherboards - 24th October 2008
• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008

• AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition - Processors
• Shuttle XPC SX48P2 Deluxe - Desktop PCs
• SilverStone Raven - Peripherals
• Raptor Gaming M3 Platinum - Peripherals
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 - Processors
• ATI Radeon HD 4670 - Graphics cards
• DFI Lanparty JR P45-T2RS - Motherboards