woohoo first post ;) - My thermaltake silent tower review

[da_ging]

Until recently my cpu had been cooled by a vapochill PE however after wanting a change I've decided to go back to air for a while before going back to water. 1 cooler that caught my eye when it was announced was the thermaltake silent tower and so now I needed an air cooler I had the perfect excuse to see if I would like the thermaltake tower in real life.
The version I got is the combo cool i.e.. just the heatsink no fans (I had wanted the version that included the fan but no one has any stock of it yet) the tower can take either 80mm or 92mm fans and either 1 or 2 fans in a push pull config. fortunately for me I had a spare 92mm panaflo fan
The box which contains the whole kit

Inside we find a full colour and well written manual a black box with all the fixings etc and the tower itself

The tower looks to be built well with all the fins evenly spaced , the base has a good finish not brilliant but I don't think any lapping is needed as it feels smooth to the touch.
Inside the black box we find all of the fittings necessary the big H brackets are for the Athlon 64 and Pentium 4 platforms while the smaller H one is used with the K7 platform

For size comparison of the heatsink I choose a rather unusual object but u get an idea of its size
With a fan attached it looks even bigger with 2 attached I should imagine it will be 2 big for some cases depending on the socket orientation and psu proximity

Installation
To install the tower requires firstly removing the motherboard from the case and then following the simple instructions from the manual which in my case is for a P4 socket 478. first I need to remove to retention bracket from the board before placing on the underside a protective foam pad and then 1 of the H brackets which is secured with 4 bolts. Next you put the second H bracket on the cooler and then thru the bolts 1 thing you do have to make sure of before you tighten the bolts is that the heatsink is sat centrally on the cpu and not to 1 side. One thing that I think could be improved upon with installation would be to include some spacers to fit over the bolts so that the correct tightness can be achieved as I found that it was quite easy to over tighten 1 side more then the other, some spacers would ensure a perfect fit every time.
Here's what it looks like when assembled fully (I should say although the fan sits over the dimm slots there was still enough room to take out the memory if I needed to with out removing the fan)



Heatsink Specifications here
(I should note it is only compatible with K7 boards that have mounting holes)

Test setup-
Intel Pentium 4 2.4C
Artic silver ceramique paste
Gigabyte 8ik1100 canterwood motherboard
2 X 256mb corsair pc3500 memory
80Gb WD 7200 8mb
Cheiftec BX case (1 80mm intake and 1 80mm exhaust fans and 1 80mm side fan)
Radeon 7500 Video card
Enermax 550w PSU
Pioneer 120s dvd-rom
Pioneer 105 dvd-rw

All tests were done with side panels on and fans at full. Readings were taken with the cpu at idle then at half load using 1 instance of prime95(max heat test) and then at full load using two instances of prime95(max heat test) ,all readings were taken after 30 minutes of the computer being in the particular state to allow the temperature to stabilize. (Motherboard Monitor was used to collect temps)

Results
(btw it was a hot day when this was done)

(due to me cocking up i lost the results of the stock heatsink on my 2.4C the stock sink results shown are from a 2.4B chip which runs cooler so while not a true comparison it gives you an idea of its cooling ability)
As we can see it certainly performs better than the stock intel heatsink and I have no doubt that if a more powerful fan setup was used the results would be even better

Pros
Well priced
Good performer ,even with a silent fan
Excellent cross-platform compatibility
Looks good

Cons
could have slightly clearer instructions on mounting it
May have problems with some boards/cases if wanting to use a 2 fan setup