Verdict: Very quiet, but only slightly better than Intel's free HSF.
When the Silentator arrived, we first thought it was the new Mr Potato Head following on from Optimash Prime and Darth Tater. To our great disappointment, though, the Silentator has very little to do with spuds.
Much like OCZ's Vendetta, the Silentator closely resembles the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro. Three heatpipes suck heat towards the fins, where a fan blows the warm air onto your exhaust fan. Simple.
Unfortunately, assembling the Silentator is an amazingly complex procedure. First, you have to install a backplate; this is usually necessary for heavier heatsinks, but the Silentator is lighter than a large baking potato, so the need to remove your motherboard before installation is just a pointless annoyance.
Two strips of metal hold the backplate in place, with the main section of the heatsink attaching to these strips. First, you must screw two pieces of metal to the base of the heatsink, and then use two large spring-loaded screws to secure it in place over the CPU. The springs are pretty firm, so once one piece of metal is screwed in (after some careful aligning), it forces the heatsink to tilt to one side, making it even more difficult to insert the final screw.
On top of this, in order to use a screwdriver with the screws, you first have to remove the large 120mm fan. This is held in place by flimsy metal clips, a second set of which is included so that you can add a second fan to the Silentator.
The fan is supplied with a backplate-mounted rheostat, and at minimum speed, the fan was all but inaudible, but the CPU temperatures matched those of the Intel reference HSF. At maximum speed the fan is also very quiet and the Silentator's cooling performance improved so much that the CPU was running 4ûC cooler than with the Intel reference HSF fitted.
Conclusion
The Silentator is very quiet, even at full speed, but it's not a particularly effective CPU HSF. For the same price, you can buy the Tuniq Tower 120 (see Issue 44, p82), which cooled the same CPU to 7ûC below the Intel reference HSF at a similar noise level, or 13ûC below at full speed.
