We’re always suspicious of cooling devices that promote their silent functionality. Quiet devices tend to use less-powerful fans or run normal fans at painfully slow speeds. And while this can do wonders for one’s hearing and general peace of mind, our reasonably noisy stock AMD cooler performs much better than the quieter devices we’ve tested.

So when a cooler comes in with the word “silent” right in its name, you can understand our skepticism regarding the product’s potential for heat removal. But Coolink’s Silentator CPU cooler survived a thorough round of Maximum PC heat testing. Better still, it outperformed our low expectations to establish itself as a solid cooling option. The Zalman CNPS9700 still retains its title as our cooling champion, but we wouldn’t mind strapping the Silentator into one of our rigs as a second option.

Installing the Silentator isn’t the most challenging process, though it is rather involved. We had to remove the cooler’s fan just to mount the cooler onto our FX-60, which isn’t a huge problem, but it definitely adds time to the process. You can, however, adjust the cooler’s direction so that air flows either horizontally or vertically, a nice touch.

We were more willing to stomach the installation after seeing the Silentator’s performance. In fact, we even reran the benchmarks to ensure that there wasn’t anything funny going on with the test rig. But the Silentator’s score held true; the Zalman is still The Hulk of cooling power, but we’d let the Silentator into our secret superhero club any day. It cools nicely, with the added bonus of being far, far quieter than the “Rock You Like a Hurricane” Zalman cooler.

The Silentator will never be as awesome as its noisy neighbors, but it balances cacophony and cooling quite nicely.

The Silentator is big, but less bulky than the bigger-than-your-head models we're used to seeing.

Coolink Silentator
www.coolink-europe.com

Dave's Secret Superhero Club

Excellent performance. Quiet too!

No Homers Club

Not quite the cooling power of louder models.