ARCTIC COOLING LIVES UP TO PROMISES (Arctic Cooling Copper Silent 2 TC)

Member Name: monkey_daz

Product:	Arctic Cooling Copper Silent 2 TC
Date:	19/06/09 (9 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Price. Silence. Cooling Performance.

Disadvantages: None I can think of!

In my quest to make my "work" PC quieter I found that most Socket A quiet coolers were made by Zalman and were very expensive, up to about £30. This is because they are mostly made of Copper or entirely of Copper. The Arctic Cooling Copper Silent 2 TC retails for around £10 and still makes use of the advantages of Copper over Aluminium. It does this by using a solid block of Copper (about 40mm x 40mm x 5mm) on the base of the aluminium heatsink. This means as much of the heat as possible is removed from the CPU and put straight into the fairly standard Aluminium heatsink, but, over a larger area.

The other great advantage of this cooler is the TC (Temperature Controlled, it can't stand for Thermocouple since the temperature sensor looks like a thermistor to me) controlled speed. For general web surfing or word processing the system will not generate much heat and so the fan will be controlled to stay at low RPM which reduces noise. Of course, if you start utilising the CPU intensively for anything it will produce more heat and this cooler will respond within seconds by increasing the fan speed. If you run the computer like this for a while you will probably notice the fan noise but even at full speed it is still ever so much quieter than the stock coolers.

I have been using this on an Athlon XP 2000+ for about 6 years now. Not only is it better at cooling than the stock cooler that the CPU came with it is quite literally silent 99% of the time. I have not had a single crash or any problems due to overheating, the temperature stays somewhere around 45°-50° C all the time. One of the reasons it is quiet is due to the unique fan design. The fan is supported by 4 thin arms that are spaced away from the fan itself so it reduces noise from the turbulence this usually creates with a standard fan. After this many years there is an ever so slight rattle to the sound of the fan if you put your ear right onto the PC case but you can't hear it from a normal seating position at all.

Installation is very easy as each one of these comes with a pre-applied pad of thermal transfer material. The only tool you need is a screwdriver as with all Socket A coolers to move the clamp onto the socket. It does get a bit bunged up with dust after a few years which doesn't really reduce the cooling performance much at all.

Summary: A hidden gem. The cheapest way to reduce the noise of your computer and still retaining coooling.

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