Thermolab Micro and Nano Silencer CPU Coolers

Installation and Test System

Installing the coolers is quite easy, but despite being lighter than stock, they do not use the stock retention system, so removal of the board will be required. This is not a negative in my eyes as 99% of the coolers we see have you to do this. The mounting hardware is very simple and consists of 4x screws and 4x washer/spacers that can best be described as “top hats” with a hole down the center.

The screws and washers are put in from the back side of the board. This was easy to do and took all of 5 minutes at most to install.

Now here is where the design of the heatpipes pretty much dictated how the cooler was going to mount. The large loops of the heatpipes would have hit the heatsinks around the socket.

ThermoLab used as much area around the socket as they could to make the foot print a large as possible to get the cooler as low as possible. So depending on the heatsink design on your motherbaord, you could have some fit up issues.

Test system

To test the coolers we ran it on our Intel Core 2 Quad test platform, which was then run only at the default settings. As a baseline all will be compared to the stock Intel cooler. All the temperatures were obtained by using Core Temp 0.95 after sitting at idle for 30 minutes and then again under 100% load for 30 minutes. To obtain 100% load, I ran four instances of Super Pi 32m calculation with the affinity of each set to a different core. The room temperature was kept a constant 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22c) for all benchmarking. All of the coolers were tested with Arctic Silver Lumiere as the thermal interface material.

The rest of the system is as follows

• Motherboard: Intel 975XBX2
• CPU: Intel Q6600
• Ram: Kingston Hyper-X DDR2 KHX9600D2/1G
• Hard Drive: Western Digital 250gb SATA
• Case: Ultra M998
• Power Supply: PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 Quad

Profile: The Normal User (No Overclocking)

• CPU Multiplier: 9x
• CPU voltage: 1.2000V
• FSB Voltage: 1.20V
• FSB: 1066MHz
• Memory Voltage: 2.20V
• Final CPU Frequency: 2.4GHz