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ASUS Extreme N7800 GTX TOP: RADEON X1800 XT Gets an Extreme Rival (page 5)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 10/24/2005 | 11:54 AM ]

Arctic Cooling NV Silencer 5: Taking the GeForce 7800 GTX to the Extreme

Computer enthusiasts who seek for both quiet operation and additional overclockability are pretty familiar with the Silencer family of coolers from Arctic Cooling company. The coolers utilize pretty large, but low-speed, fan along with copper radiators for both GPU and memory.

ASUSTeK uses a special revision (revision 3) of the NV Silencer 5 to power its N7800GTX TOP product. The cooling system features large 3.5mm thick copper base along with a huge aluminum heat sink. Such construction has proven its efficiency on various graphics cards and processors, as copper is among the best heat conductors, whereas aluminum is among the best heat dissipaters; provided that the copper and aluminum are connected together properly, such tandem should be very efficient.

There is a drawback the NV Silencer 5 has: it uses thermal pads to cool down GDDR3 memory on the front side of the board. Probably, special lugs made of copper would conduct heat better than the pads, however, lugs require a bit more thorough installation in order to contact memory really well. Furthermore, Arctic Cooling could probably supply a copper heat-spreader for memory located on the back side of the graphics card, as currently users have to use the aluminum plate supplied with reference coolers, which is probably not the most efficient thing.

Featuring 2000rpm fan, the NV Silencer 5 is not only capable of cooling down the GeForce 7800 GTX quietly, but very efficiently as well. It is a dual-slot cooling solution, but performance increase compared to the reference cooler probably worth an extra slot.