When we last checked in with GELID Solutions, they were just starting out. The company was only a year old, and wasn’t all that well known yet. The only product they had sent us was some thermal goop, which we actually found wasn’t too bad. Well GELID has been quite busy. Today we’re taking a look at their first CPU cooler, the Silent Spirit Quad Heatpipe CPU Cooler. The cooler employs 4 heatpipes and a raised set of heatsink fins to attempt to cool your CPU quietly and effectively. The heatsink is cooled by a 92mm PWM powered Silent 9 fan, and is rated at a fan speed ranging from 900 RPM to 2000 RPM. Noise levels hit 11 dBA to 23.5 dBA respectively.
As for pricing, it’s hard to determine as the GELID Silent Spirit is only available from one online store in North America. Our good friends over at NCIX.com have it listed for $34.99 CDN, which puts the Silent Spirit in close competition with the venerable Arctic Cooling Freezer series. That’ll be handy, as both the Arctic Cooling Freezer and the GELID Silent Spirit share similar specifications. They both sport heatpipe designs, silent fans, and well thought out fin design. They’re also both mid-range coolers, which will make things interesting when we put the Silent Spirit up against some of the coolers we’ve previously reviewed on our hot-running test bed. For more in depth specifications, you can check out the product home page.
What’s In The Box?
Inside the box, there are mounting brackets for both Socket 775 and Socket AM2/AM2+, and they’re designed to use the OEM mounting bracket that is already installed on your board. Socket 939 users aren’t left out in the cold either, as the included clip should connect to that bracket as well. As for paperwork, GELID included a single sheet installation guide as well as a case badge if you want to advertise your cooling solution of choice. GELID also sends word that a new mounting bracket for the INTEL Socket 1366 will also be available in the near future.
The Silent Spirit Up Close
As noted, the fan tasked with cooling the heatsink portion of this CPU cooler is billed as a silent model. The reason this fan is able to remain silent is due to its design. One of the main causes of noise in computer fans is the turbulence generated between the tips of the blades and the walls of the fan housing while the fan is spinning. The model of fan used for the Silent Spirit employs a design that eliminates this housing, which eliminates the noise. The fan is also mounted using rubber plugs, which will reduce noise further by absorbing and eliminating vibrations.
The multitude of fins on the heatsink portion of the Silent Spirit should further enhance its cooling abilities. To effectively cool a CPU, an actively cooled heatsink (ie: one with a fan) needs as much surface area on it’s cooling fins as possible to dissipate the heat generated by the processor. This is done by either adding lots of fins, or adding material to the fins to increase their surface area. Since the Silent Spirit is a relatively small cooler, GELID went with the latter choice. They added a whole bunch of bumps to the surface of the heatsink fins. They also staggered the height of the fins across the length of the heatsink. These two engineering decisions should, in theory, give the Silent Spirit a good boost over other similar CPU coolers.
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Due to the design of, and intent behind this cooler, the airflow from the fan isn’t directly blowing onto the CPU. Rather it’s directed off-centre, and at an angle away from the CPU to the most common location on the motherboard for the voltage regulation components. As for mounting the heatsink, the Silent Spirit comes with the hardware for mounting it to an Intel rig installed by default. With a couple twists of a screwdriver you can easily switch this mounting hardware to something more AMD compatible. Both mounting solutions still use the plastic OEM mounting bracket that should have came with your motherboard.
The actual plate the makes contact with the CPU is made of copper, and is bonded to the copper heatpipes. The surface of the contact place isn’t all that shiny, and doesn’t appear to have received any type of lapping treatment. That being said, it does come with a generous dose of GELID’s GC1 Thermal Compound already applied. We ended up cleaning it off for these pictures, which came after installing and removing the heatsink. Usually lapping the contact surface on a heatsink can greatly increase it’s contact with the CPU, and make it a better cooler. We still have to see how well this cooler performs against our reviewed CPU coolers.
Test Setup
To test the GELID Silent Spirit CPU cooler we ran a few stress tests that maxed our the CPU, which of course produced the most heat and put the most strain on the cooler. The CPU cooler was installed in the following test bed.
- AMD Phenom 9850 2.5GHz Quad Core CPU
- Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe/WiFi-AP 790FX Motherboard
- Corsair Dominator DDR2 4GB PC2-8500 RAM Kit
- ZOTAC GeForce GTX 260 AMP! Edition Video Card
- GELID GC1 High Performance Thermal Compound
- HighSpeed PC Top Deck Tech Station
- Thermaltake Toughpower 1000W Power Supply
Throughout this review I’ve made several comparisons between the GELID Silent Spirit and the old Arctic Cooling Freezer CPU Cooler, even though I wasn’t able do any hard testing using that cooler. Though I do own one, it’s unfortunately tied into a system that cannot be taken down. Instead I used the cooler that is most commonly seen adorning my test rig, the Cooler Master Hyper 212. This cooler is a beast compared to the GELID Silent Spirit, and both coolers are being tested on a CPU that is at the maximum supported by the GELID cooler. I think it goes without saying that I think we all know where this is going.
Cooling Performance
It really should be no surprise that the monsterous Cooler Master Hyper 212 blows the GELID Silent Spirit out of the water in thermal performance in our main tests. The two coolers are a class or two apart. The GELID is a medium range cooler, and though it can cool a top end Phenom, it doesn’t have a whole lot of headroom. It still does an admirable job under this most stressful conditions. When cooling a processor with 1/2 to 3/4 of the thermal output of the Phenom 9850 we used in testing, it should do much better.
Acoustically, the GELID produced the same results as it did in our thermal tests. As mentioned before, the fan on the Silent Spirit is a PWM powered model. As temperatures rise and more stress is placed on the CPU, the BIOS will drive up the speed of the fan to its maximum. Since we are using the top supported CPU, the fan was very quickly driven to its maximum speed, which means it got a little noisy. The Silent Spirit was much more audible than CoolerMaster.
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The GELID Silent Spirit Meets an Old Friend…
It isn’t all doom and gloom for the GELID Silent Spirit though. This cooler can’t compete against a top end CPU cooler, but it isn’t meant to. It was meant to compete against other mid range coolers, and be as silent as possible while doing it. With that in mind, I did the unthinkable and took down the un-down-takeable system to test this cooler against the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro.
The processor residing in this system was a much more modest Athlon 64 X2 3800+. Here the GELID cooler beat out the Arctic Cooling unit by 2°C in both idle and load temperatures. On its own this is a modest achievement at best, but the GELID is actually lighter then the Arctic Cooling Freezer by a couple hundred grams, and it managed to remain just as silent while in operation.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion
CPU coolers like the GELID Silent Spirit can be hard for a reviewer to classify. They don’t offer balls to the wall performance, and are usually made to fit a niche. Finding that niche is necessary to determine whether or not the cooler is successful. The GELID Silent Spirit is a mid-range cooler meant for ultra quiet systems that don’t require maximum cooling performance. It’s small size and overall design speak to this. So does it achieve what what was intended? Well it’s undeniable that the cooler won’t hold up to the performance offered by a large fan based cooler. Still the Silent Spirit held it’s own against it’s main competition (Freezer 64 Pro), and even managed to best it in a couple areas.
There’s the niggling problem of availability in North America. As noted in the beginning, the GELID Silent Spirit is currently only available at NCIX.com. There’s also the consideration that this cooler isn’t for those who are looking to cool a high end processor like the Phenom 9850BE, and still maintain an air of silence. It really is only useful for such a setup if that setup is found in a case with some size constraints like a Home Theatre PC Case.
I would be amazed to see a cooler of this size perform as well as some of the big boys, but I can’t change the laws of physics. In the end, this performs well for what it’s intended, and can do in a pinch should you have a case of small enclosure syndrome. Does the GELID Silent Spirit meet the expectations for a mid-range cooler? It’s definitely a strong contender, and won’t disappoint should it find itself in your HTPC or quiet PC.
Pros
- Performs as well as competition
- Silent at low speeds
- Cools both CPU and components around socket
- Small and light
Cons
- Still not widely available in North America
- Loud at top speeds
- Doesn’t perform as well with high end CPUs
Overall Rating: 8.0 / 10.0
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GELID Silent Spirit Quad Heatpipe CPU Cooler Photo Gallery
Real-Time Price and Stock Check – Find More CPU Coolers Here