Sunbeam Silent Whisper Cooler

The base is constructed of two copper billets that are welded together over the heatpipes.  The fit and finish of this weld leaves much to be desired in the way of aesthetics.  Let's hope it's only aesthetics because a sub-par weld will show up quickly in the performance of the unit.  The mounting bracket, be that for Intel or AMD, is then screwed in place at the factory depending on which unit you have.  The unit shown below is the LGA775 cooler as we have already mentioned.  The base is also pre-coated with what looks to be a silver based thermal interface material.  To be sure we are testing the cooler and not the paste, we will be taking this off.

  

Removing the factory thermal interface material we find a reasonably smooth surface.  We couldn't detect any abnormality by touch but the surface was not exactly a mirror lap job as you can see below.

  

Performance

For comparison purposes, we are going to put the Sunbeam Silent Whisper against the Tt MaxOrb with its fan speed set to low.  While I don't expect this to be a fair fight performance wise, it will give you results that can easily be extrapolated to other cooler reviews here at the Penthouse Labs.  Both coolers will be installed and run five times by placing our Core 2 Duo processor cores at 100% load by way of SiSoft Sandra's XI Burn In Module for 30 minutes with a final temperature reading taken at the end.  The highest and lowest results will be thrown out and the remaining three will be averaged and graphed.  ThermalRight Chill Factor Thermal Paste will be used in all tests.   Ambient room temperature at time of testing remained within one half a degree of 24.5 degrees C.

Results

Conclusion

To properly put the performance into perspective you need to remember this is a $13 cooler made as an OEM replacement.  Obviously, the Sunbeam Silent Whisper isn't going to the a first or for that matter, a top ten choice for a cooling solution in an overclocked rig.  But, for a generic system builder looking at offering good performance while keeping cost down, the Silent Whisper zooms to the top of the list quite suddenly. 

That's not to say that the Silent Whisper is without a few faults.  With the name, "Silent Whisper" I truly expected a silent or near silent cooling option.  The Sunbeam cooler does okay in the noise department but under power it neither operates as silent or at a whisper.  The second issue is more one of aesthetics.  The welding on the base looked like it was done eight beers into a twelve pack to me.  However, under load, the Sunbeam Silent Whisper showed that while the weld looked bad, it performed well.  This $13 cooler made a fair showing that certainly gets a nod overall.  Add in the bang per buck value and Sunbeam has a nice product on its hands that is bound to attract attention.  This cooler is available at NewEgg here for the LGA775 model and here for the AMD K8 model which is priced a few bucks more at $20  Thanks go to Sunbeam Technology for sponsoring this review.

Pros

• Adequate performance

• Excellent value

• Nice fit and finish with exception of weld points

Cons

• Not all that quiet

• fair weld quality

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