Gelid Silent Spirit LGA 1366 CPU Cooler Review

GELID and The Silent Spirit

GELID solutions is a new face on the market. GELID is a company formed between a former Arctic Cooling founder, Gebhard Scherrer and their PR contact, VC Tran . GELID offers thermal management solutions ranging from fans, thermal materials, and heatsinks. GELID opened its doors for business 7 months ago, and 2 months later it launched its Silent Spirit. GELID states that they wish to produce high-performance and virtually silent heatsinks; the Silent Spirit looks to fulfill the latter goal.

The latest trend in heatsink design has been to add more heatpipes, add more fins, and make everything wider and taller. GELID’s Silent Spirit flips this concept on its side with a small heatsink with an unusual design and unique fin shape. With a 100mm fan spinning on average around 1600RPM, 46 max CFM, and only 370g of material, the Silent Spirit hopes to pack a lot of punch in a very light frame. It weighs less than half of the popular Thermalright Ultra 120, clears every motherboard I could mount it to, and is silent to boot.

Since silence is the ultimate goal with this heatsink, I have decided to pit it up against what I consider to be the ultimate in silent cooling, the Scythe Ninja. The Scythe Ninja is a monstrosity of a heatsink with such widely spaced fins that it can actually be passively cooled. By comparison the Scythe Ninja has a 120mm fan spinning at 1200rpm, 49 max CFM, and 640g of material. Let’s take a closer look at the Silent Spirit before burning it in.