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Thermaltake Silent Boost K8 Heatsink Review Author:Jakester Date Posted: February 21st, 2004
SLRating:
Bottom Line:
Every little helps when overclocking, the Silent Boost K8 is a very well built heatsink unit and it
does offer a reason to upgrade from the stock AMD Athlon 64 cooler. Would we reccomend it? Find out in our official review.......
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Silent Boost K8 Heatsink fan
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Small bag thermal compound
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Installation guide
Fan:
The "Hydro Wave Bearing" fan spins at 2450 RPM and operates on, as you probably guessed, ball
bearings. That and the multi-leveled air duct surrounding the fan blades make
for a very quiet unit. The only sound I heard radiating from my case were the 3
other case fans.
Heatsink Surface:
The base of the copper heatsink is was you would expect. The
face of the base has sanding scratches all across its surface, but none of these
were very deep grooves and performance most likely isn't affected by them. The
included thermal compound gets rid of the problem entirely by filling in these
grooves. As you can see above, Thermaltake decided to advertise their URL
www.thermaltake.com on the base as well as the side of the heatsink.
There are a total of 46 fins copper fins attached to the base of the heatsink.
This is 20 less than Thermaltake's Volcano 12, and seems to be a step backwards
since the more fins a heatsink has the better it dissipates heat.
Installation:
Installation of the Silent Boost K8 was a very pleasant experience. After
removing the stock AMD Athlon 64 heatsink from the processor, I applied some OCZ
Thermal compound. Then I put the heatsink in place, engaged the clip onto the
retention frame and flipped the lever. Piece of cake. This new style of
screwdriver-free heatsink is much better than older heatsinks. There is no
longer a worry about slipping and jamming the screwdriver into the PCB of the
motherboard, or worse yet the circuitry. Another worry was that the heatsink may
not fit because on the FIC K8 motherboard there is a line of capacitors along
the left side of the CPU, but the Silent Boost K8 is the same size as the stock
AMD cooler so there was no conflict with space.
