Verdict: More shrill than an Essex girl's hen night, and no more useful for cooling CPUs

Most CPU HSFs are fitted with a single fan for a good reason - two fans make more noise than one. This makes SilverStone's decision to fit two fans to the NT03 a rather brave one.

As the NT03 is very short, there's no room for a single large fan, so the two fans sit on either side of the HSF. Unfortunately, because of the tiny dimensions of the NT03, the fans are only 60mm models and have to spin at 3,600rpm to move a respectable amount of air (17.89cfm each). As you can imagine, two tiny fans spinning at this speed produce a really unpleasant whining noise that's more usually associated with drowning rats.

Thanks to its low-profile design, the NT03 doesn't have much surface area to dissipate heat, so it came as no surprise that it couldn't successfully cool our Pentium 4 test PC, which overheated and shut down. It cooled our Athlon 64 test CPU to just 1ûC below the reference AMD HSF.

The NT03 is incapable of keeping an overclocked and overvolted Pentium 4 cool, so it isn't worth touching with a bargepole if you own an Intel CPU. It also isn't worth buying for an Athlon 64, because for almost half the price, you can buy the far superior and quieter Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro.

• 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

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