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ATI Silencer 1, 2 & 3 Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Wednesday, 06 October 2004 |
Rage3D has published a review
on the ATI Silencer 1, 2
& 3. After their release of the VGA Silencer, Arctic Cooling quickly
earned a respected reputation and became known as the manufacturer of one of the
most popular VGA coolers ever created. The unique design made the VGA Silencer
an excellent performer, but what really impressed most people was how whisper
quiet the unit was.
 ATI Silencer 1, 2 & 3 Review
Arctic Cooling recreated the cooler and refined the overall design to make it sleeker and more modern looking. However, whereas before a single VGA Silencer would fit on many different cards, Arctic Cooling has altered their approach and now has many different coolers that each are designed for a certain series of cards. All told there are 4 different ATI Silencers and 5 different NV Silencers that are designed for everything from the Radeon 9500 to the Radeon X800 and the GeForce 4 to the GeForce 6800.
One of the biggest problems that may face a lot of users is the size of the cooler itself. Taking up an extra expansion slot shouldn't be an issue for most users, but the length of the cooler may cause problems with some motherboards. With a test mATX motherboard for example, the two IDE connectors are behind the AGP slot on the edge of the motherboard. When the cooler is installed it sits directly above both of the connectors. I can still plug the IDE cables in, but I must remove the graphics card to get the cooler out of the way first.
There are many revisions a graphics card goes through during it's manufacturing lifetime and PCB layouts change often, sometimes drastically, and sometimes there are even different versions of the same card that use completely different circuit boards. However, the compatibility issues I experienced on the 9800 Pro, 9700 Pro, and in particular the 9500 Pro were disappointing. Granted, all three cards are fairly old now, but they are all reference designs and I would think owned by a good many people. As I mentioned in the review, it would be a good idea to do some research before buying one of these coolers, particularly so if your card happens to be one that differs slightly from ATI's reference design.
Overall, the biggest problem I have with the ATI Silencer is that they do not fit on the All-In-Wonder cards. Why it is that Arctic Cooling never designed them to work with those cards, or even designed a separate compatible version of the cooler, I don't know. It seems to me that people with All-In-Wonder cards who, like me, have them installed in a HTPC would be very interested in a high performance and quiet cooler such as the ATI Silencer.
Compatibility issues aside, I was very impressed with the performance of all the ATI Silencers I tested in this review. Not only do they offer fantastic cooling performance, they are all also very quiet and affordable. These traits don't often go together, particularly when we are talking cooling units.
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