The Silent Square Pro is as top of the line as ASUS's thermal solutions get. Can this massive heatpipe tower keep up with the competition with just an internally-mounted 92mm fan?
Category: Cooler
Manufacturer: ASUS
Product: Silent Square Pro
Gallery: Click Here
Price: $59.80
Keeping track of everything that’s going on in the hardware world can be a daunting task. We make extensive use of xml feeds and frequently visit the websites of all the hardware manufacturers we can think of, but still there are product releases that slip,
silently, under our radar. Of course we hit the big launches; processors from Intel and AMD, video cards from ATI and NVIDIA; and even smaller things like motherboard launches, new mice and keyboards, and even mousepads. The trickiest part of finding the smaller releases is that they are often carried out by companies that are not particularly well known for making the kind of product being released.
And for some reason it always seems like the products that we miss are in fact gaming related in some way. Companies often create a family of components under a certain label in order to associate them with the gaming and/or enthusiast market. We have seen this time and time again from the
Fatal1ty series of products from XFX, Abit, and
Creative, as well as more straight-forward approaches like ASUS’ Republic of Gamers series and Foxconn’s upcoming Quantum Force line. We always knew ASUS made CPU coolers, but we never really considered them to be in the upper echelon of manufacturers in the field. From the specs listed for some of the
coolers on their website, it is quite clear that ASUS means to change our premonitions. The ASUS Silent Square Pro stands at the top of the cooler totem pole at ASUS, figuratively and literally. This giant heat pipe tower has a lot of interesting features that distinguish it from its competition, but do they help ward off heat? Let’s take a closer look.
User Comments
that website has a very different opinion on this cooler.
**Please note that all of our testing was done on a quad-core processor with a 120W TDP (actual value is more likely around 140-150W). Quad-core processors (specifically, Kentsfield-based chips from Intel Corp) produce quite literally twice the heat as their dual-core brethren, and as such require the use of different cooling philosophies. There are different types of heat transfer. Coolers reviewed on sites like Anandtech will receive final results different than those shown on our site because Anandtech uses a dual-core processor for all of their thermal tests (as of writing, September 07). Typically, coolers that score very well on Anandtech are capable of moving (smaller amounts of) heat very quickly and also getting rid of it quickly through convection, thus producing lower temperatures. Such coolers might not necessarily perform well at FPSLabs because the processor we use to test produces far more heat and is a much more stressful task for the cooler. Thermal solutions that perform well in our tests might not move heat as quickly as top-performing coolers on Anandtech, but far more heat is being moved and removed, just at higher overall temperatures.
#4, Using a different fan on these coolers would defeat the purpose of testing them against each other apples to apples. We test out of the box performance because that is how the vast majority people will use it. However, we might have to get some really good fans and add the results of using those in future reviews.
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