GELID Silent Spirit Review

Testing:

Testing the Silent Spirit is done in two steps: checking the temperature of the CPU at idle after sitting in Windows Vista for thirty minutes, and at full load for the CPU using Prime95’s Small FFT option for thirty minutes as well. The heat sink will be tested twice under these constraints, once at stock 2.66ghz (133x20), and again at an overclocked 3.32ghz (166x20) with 1.25v. Temperatures are recorded with Realtemp, and are averaged out and reported in Celsius.

Testing System:

• Processor: Intel i7 920
• Motherboard: MSI X58 Platinum
• Memory: Mushkin HP3 12800 3x2gb DDR3
  
• Video Card(s): Nvidia GTX260 216sp
• Power Supply: Mushkin 800 watt Modular power supply
• Hard Drive: 1 x Western Digital Green 1TB SATA
• OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 64-Bit SP1

Comparison Cases:

• Stock Intel i7 Heatsink
• Noctua NH-U12P SE 1366

While testing the Gelid Silent Spirit the temperatures at idle were all very similar in both the stock and overclocked testing the differences showed up under load. In the stock testing with he CPU running with the default vcore the temperature differential between the stock Intel heat sink and the Silent Spirit was 11 degrees Celsius. When overclocked the differential came in at 6 degrees, still a significant improvement over the results of the stock heat sink. The heat sink looks to be able to handle the 130w i7 920, and would probably fair even better with a dual-core or tri-core processor. Our initial testing of the Silent Spirit did not show any real difference between the stock Intel sink and the Silent Spirit, a result that was unexpected based on the configuration of the cooler. Gelid was kkind enough to send another sample for us to test and these results are more in line with the capabilities of the cooler.