Arctic Cooling NV Silencer 5 (Rev. 3)

Anybody who has ever looking into third party coolers for their graphics card in the last couple of years has stumbled upon the Silencer series from Arctic Cooling. Since the first incarnation this VGA cooler was very successful with a low price, easy installation and excellent performance/noise ratio. The model on the test bench today is from the NV (which, as you guessed it, stands for nVidia) series, the 5 revision 3 adds compatibility for the 7800GT(X) to the short-list.


Photo © Arctic Cooling

Compatibility

While the Silencer series offers near plug and play installation it does skimp a bit on the compatibility front, by designing their products to fit only a limited range of VGA cards they can keep installation hassle to a minimum, but it does mean you most likely will buy a new third party VGA cooling when you upgrade.




The NV Silencer 5 (Rev. 3) fits on:

Geforce 6800 AGP Series

FX 4000 AGP

Geforce 6800 PCIe Series

Geforce 7800 PCIe series

Quadro FX 1400, 3400, 3450, 4400 ,4500

Some third party PCB designs might interfere with this cooler so that’s why they have posted a nifty height restriction drawing (.pdf) at their product page.

Installation

It’s simply a matter of placing the thermal pads on the memory chips, applying a bit of thermal paste on the core, and then installing the unit on the card.


When you remove the Silencer, the thermal pads stick to the heatsink

Compared to the stock cooling this thing is huge


At the back side a rubber pad and metal mounting bracket is used to hold the cooler in place.



A good fit: