Thermaltake Silent Tower Cooler

You then lower your cooler on top of your processor with another 'H' shaped plate running through the heatpipes.  Each corner of the 'H' has a hole in it that the four screws we just noted, go into.  All that is left is screwing another nut down on each corner so the holding plate keeps the cooler snug atop your processor.

What I found particularly smart in the design is that the orientation of sockets is not always the same.  The Silent Tower is set up so that the air blowing across the convection fins can blow toward a rear case fan or up towards a power supply so that this warmer air can be moved out of the case keeping the inside case temperature down.  You will have one or the other of these options every time. 

We didn't run double fans in all our tests but I did want to point out that the second fan when installed, will stick out beyond the border of the mainboard in some instances.  The power supply, if the socket orientation is up/down, will prevent the use of a second fan.

Performance

Testing the Thermaltake Silent Tower, we ran tests of it in stock trim with the exception of on our K7 test bed where a 90mm fan was attached opposite the primary fan to give us a glimpse of what twin fans bring to the performance table.  Our current comparison cooler is the ThermalRight ALX-800 equipped with a 76 CFM fan for K7 based platforms.  In addition to the ALX-800 we will be using a Swiftech MCX 4000 also equipped with a 76 CFM fan so we can look at how well the Silent Tower does on a P4.

Load temperatures were obtained from five successive runs of SiSoft Sandra 2004's CPU burn in module which was run for 30 minutes.  The highest and lowest recorded temperatures for each run were thrown out and the remaining three then averaged.  Ambient room temperature was 24.4 degrees Celsius and did not fluctuate more than .3 degrees during testing.  Generic silicone thermal paste was used in all tests.

Test Bed (s)

AMD K7

• AMD Athlon XP 3200+

• ABIT AN7 mainboard

• Albatron GeForce FX5950 Ultra VGA

• (2) 256 mb DIMM of Corsair XMS3500 DDR

• Maxtor 80gb SATA HDD

• Generic DVD/CD-RW combo drive

• Windows XP Pro