Hardware Bistro

Product: Silent Spirit
Manufacturer: GELID Solutions
Supplied by: GELID Solutions
Price: USD35/RM126
Launch Date: Oct 2008

 

Recently there is a new cooling brand established which focus on silent product; GELID Solutions. If you have been following PC industry lately then you should hear them before. After reviewed with their Wing & Silent fans which are good performance fans, today we are going to test out their first and very charming CPU cooler; Silent Spirit. Let us see how this cooler perform.

 

Company Profile

GELID Solutions Ltd. is a Hong Kong based company with Swiss Management and founded in 2008 by Gebhard SCHERRER and VC TRAN. Both have worked in the PC Cooling industry for a number of years and successfully built up an IT company with their expertise. The English word "gelid" is derived from the Latin word "gelidus" (extremely cold, icy).

GELID designs and manufactures thermal solutions, CPU coolers, fans, and other computer hardware for both gamers and silent enthusiasts. Gelid Solution provide computer hardware distributors, retailers and system integrators with innovative, virtually silent, high- performance and top quality thermal solutions. Quality and innovation are key. And, being Swiss, Gelid leave nothing to chance. That's why Gelid Soliton provide a total solution - from bearings to thermal compound, from design to shipping, from the moulding of the fan to the print on the box - with state-of-the-art machines and experienced staff.

 

Features:

- Quad Sintered Heatpipes
- Unique Fin Architecture
- Special Heatsink Angle Design
- Optimized Air Flow Concept
- Intelligent PWM Fan Control Curve
- Anti-Vibration Fan Mounts

 

Specifications

 

Package & Contents

 

GELID Solutions has two major concepts for their products; Gamer and Silent. Obvious Silent Spirit is from Silent product series and with this, Silent Spirit packaging is in pure white color which is matching with their Silent fan series packaging as well. This is good marketing strategy for people to recognize and remember their products. To avoid damage on the Silent Spirit heatsink during transportation, a sponge is added to give additional support for the aluminum fins of the heatsink. 

 

GELID Solutions Silent Spirit comes with a rectangular packaging box and the features/specifications are written down very detail on it; good reference for customer before purchase it. There is a diagram on the packaging which shows that Silent Spirit is not only able to cool down the processor but as well as the chipset/components around the CPU socket area such as MOSFET.

 

The packaging contents are simple for GELID Solutions Silent Spirit where it comes with a user manual, GELID logo sticker, AMD installation clips and lastly of course the cooler itself. For future enhancement purpose, the GELID logo sticker can be made by better quality material like Aluminum since GELID Solutions is trying so hard to promote their products.

 

 

GELID Solutions Silent Spirit

 

The first impression for us for the GELID Solutions Silent Spirit is that this heatsink looks extremely charming. This is one of the CPU coolers that make us drool with its unique design and absolutely suitable for case modding or transparent casing for case showoff events. Silent Spirit is the first attempted CPU cooler by GELID Solutions which suitable for both Intel and AMD platforms; additional clip for Intel Socket 1366 will be launched later. The whole cooler of Silent Spirit is just 370grams which is a quite light weight for a 92mm heatpipe CPU cooler.

 

GELID Solutions Silent Spirit is using heatpipe technology as well where there are total four heatpipes. Most of the heatsink will only have three heatpipes due to its cost and it is good to see GELID Solutions to use four of them. These heatpipes of Silent Spirit do not have direct contact with processor which is the latest strategy for cooler manufacturers where it is able to transfer the heat faster from processor to heatsink.

 

Here is the picture of the end of the heatpipes at aluminum fins. These four heatpipes were assembled with the aluminum fins very well. For the second picture, you will notice there are many dots on the aluminum fins/plates which are used to increase the surface area in order to maximize the cooling efficiency. Just with this point then you will understand how GELID Solutions focuses on their products; credit to them.

 

Here are the aluminum fins of GELID Solutions Silent Spirit. Aluminum has very good heat dissipation factor and it is cheaper, light than copper which makes it so popular in cooling sector. If you see clearly on the picture then you will found that all the fins are not even which is precisely calculated to help the air flow through evenly to get the better result than traditional fins arrangement. This is new thing for us and base on its theory, it should work well in ideal case. The whole heatsink is made in optimal position and angle to mazimize the utilization of fresh air to cool down the processor.

 

After gone through the copper heatpipes and aluminum fins of Silent Spirit, let us proceed with Nickel plated aluminum heatsink and copper base. The aluminum Nickel plated aluminum heatsink acts as a secondary gate to get the processor cooler where it transfers the heat from processor directly to here and get cool down by the airflow that have passed through the aluminum fins. The copper base already preinstalled with a layer of GELID Solutions GC-1 which is one of the best thermal compounds which we have tested before. The copper base is not mirror finish but at long as the base is smooth enough then it will impact the cooling performance.

 

For the installation clips of GELID Solutions Silent Spirit, it is using same clip as Intel stock cooler. This clip works well for light heatsink and since Silent Spirit is just weighted around 370grams so it should work very well with it and basically we are happy to use the cooler that comes with such clips because the installation is a piece of cake, no motherboard remove is required. For AMD system, the default clips need to be changed to AMD clips which comes with the bundle.

 

Now let us concentrate on the fan of Silent Spirit. GELID Solutions uses 92mm fan on it which is a Hydro Dynamic bearing fan with 900 to 2400 RPM with maximum noise of 25.8dB. No airflow information is stated but the air flow should be within 30-40CFM. The fan is mounted on the heatsink with anti-vibration rubber fan mount to absorb the vibration of the running fan when mount on a heatsink.

 

The cable of the Silent Spirit fan is sleeved which is good cable management and looks nice for case modding too. The design of the fan structure has been improved to eliminate humming and buzzing noises but still maintain in a compact size. The fan is a PWM fan which its RPM will operate according to CPU workload through BIOS; to eliminate all kind of manual control.

 

Testing & Performance

Installation is simple for GELID Solutions Silent Spirit where motherboard remove is not required. Users just need to snap in the clips in the motherboard, connect the fan cable to motherboard and that is for installation. For removal, it is simple as well because motherboard remove is not required too, users just need to turn the clip to counter clockwise and pull back the clips. Overall we didn't face any severe or major difficulties during installation and uninstallation for GELID Solutions Silent Spirit, that is great for those are not willing to do much steps in order to get this thing up.

 

TestBed
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E8300
Memory: 4GB 800MHz DDR2 Memory
Hard Drive: 250GB 7200RPM 8MB Seagate HDD
Graphic Card: Nvidia GeForce GTX280
Optical Drive: 16x DVD RW
System BIOS: F7
Operating System: Microsoft Window XP SP2
Benchmark Software: Gigabyte Easy Tune 6
Ambient Temperature: 27 Degree Celsius

Here are the testing results for GELID Solutions Silent Spirit compare with other heatpipe CPU coolers except Intel stock cooler. When compare stock cooler with Silent Spirit, we found that there are great improvement and its performance same with NorthQ 3350A which is a 92mm tower heatpipe cooler. This is quite amazing as Silent Spirit is much smaller, lighter, and quieter than NonthQ 3350A but it still able to perform as good as it. However when come with 120mm tower heatpipe cooler then Silent Spirit of course cannot beat them since there are huge gap between them but for the first cooler from GELID Solution, this should be very outstanding.

 

Conclusion

With 35USD for GELID Solutions Silent Spirit, it may not the best choice with its performance during our testing. Nevertheless, we are still quite impressed with its design and the hard work that GELID Solutions has put on it. If you are looking for a charming and decent performance CPU cooler maybe for case showoff then you may consider Silent Spirit from GELID Solutions. Silent Spirit is just a starting for GELID Solutions cooler product and we should expect more amazing products from them maybe "Wing Spirit" or 120mm version of Silent Spirit.

 

Pros:
* Four heatpipes with ultimate aluminum fins
* Able to cool down components near beside processor
* Easy installation & uninstallation
* Rubber fan mount
* Changable for 92mm fan

 

Cons:
* Not cheap

Thanks to GELID Solutions for providing this sample for us to review.

 

 

Only registered users may post a comment.

There are currently no user submitted comments.