Arctic Cooling NV Silencer 6 (Rev. 2) VGA Cooler

Introduction

Arctic Cooling manufactures a series of VGA coolers that are very silent and pull the hot air generated by the video card to outside the computer case. At least two VGA manufacturers – HIS and Sapphire – sell their VGAs using VGA coolers from Arctic Cooling. If you don’t have a VGA using an exotic cooling system, you can buy a VGA cooler from Arctic Cooling and install it yourself. We’ve got a NV Silencer 6 (Rev. 2) sample, which is targeted to GeForce FX 5700, GeForce 6200 and GeForce 6600 series. Let’s take a look at it.

You can see the full list of VGA coolers from Arctic Cooling on their website. As you can see there, they have several different models, each one targeted to specific video cards. There are several reasons you cannot use a VGA cooler targeted to one video card on another. First, the holes located on the video card used to fasten the cooler to it may differ in position. The second reason is that each graphics chip has different thermal requirements – i.e., the minimum size and material of the cooler base and fins vary according to the graphics chip. Third, the VGA cooler may be bigger than the space available on the video card (for example, the area surrounding the graphics chip may have other components like electrolytic capacitors that prevent the installation of bigger coolers).

Figure 1: NV Silencer 6 (Rev. 2) in its package.

In Figure 2, you can see everything that comes with the product, including a tube of thermal grease.

Figure 2: Items that come with NV Silencer 6 (Rev. 2).

NV Silencer 6 (Rev. 2) VGA cooler has a big 72 mm fan rotating at a relatively low speed (1,500 rpm) in order to achieve a low noise level. This fan pulls air from inside the PC case, makes it to pass through the cooler fins and going outside the computer case through a duct.

The heatsink base is made of copper, while the heatsink fins are made of aluminum, as you can see on Figures 3 and 4.

Figure 3: The heatsink base is made of copper.

Figure 4: The heatsink fins are made of aluminum.

In Figure 5 you have a comparison between NV Silencer 6 (Rev. 2) and the coolers that come with video cards from Sapphire and HIS. This particular Sapphire model is using an ATI Silencer 5 (Rev. 2), while this particular HIS model is using a VGA silencer Rev. 3, both are manufactured by Arctic Cooling.

Figure 5: NV Silencer 6 (Rev. 2), a Sapphire Radeon X800 Pro and a HIS Radeon X1600 Pro.