| #705 - SilverStone NT04 Cooler |
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| Written by Zach Jeffers | ||||||||||||||||
| Thursday, 27 July 2006 | ||||||||||||||||
Page 3 of 3 Testing and Conclusion: This cooler performed just as I suspected. I tested the SilverStone NT04 CPU cooler on a Sempron 3000+ AM2 with Serious Sam 2 Demo running for 15mins, along with normal web surfing and office apps for an additional 15mins. Ambient room temperature during this test was about 38C, case temp was about 42C and the CPU temp never rose above 50C. That is and average of about 5C less than the stock retail cooler that came with the Sempron and noticeably quieter! Now I had mentioned before about the thermal compound pre-applied to the SilverStone NT04. I removed the stock thermal interface and replaced it with some wonderful GEIL copper thermal paste. This took the CPU temperatures down to an average of 48C. So, the stock thermal application should not need replacement, but for those squeezing every degree out of their HSF, you may want to check out a high end thermal paste. In addition to these tests, I also removed the aluminum frame from the fan and mounted the exposed fan directly to the NT04’s aluminum base. This resulted with temps increasing on an average of 2-4C. Overall, SilverStone has created one swell HSF. This fan comes at a very good price range and fits most all AMD’s newer sockets. This is a great replacement to the retail HSF shipped with Semprons and Socket 754’s. The NT04 would not be recommended of a system built with an AMD X2 processor. Though it would cool the CPU to an functional temperature, but the temperatures might be a bit too high for stable game play and other CPU intensive applications. I would like to see possible a copper variant or copper inserted variant of this cooler. With all that said, the SilverStone NT04 HSF is a Great product!
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