SilverStone Nitrogon NT03

Written by Michael Larabel in Peripherals on 4 December 2005 at 01:00 PM EST. Page 4 of 4. Add A Comment.

Conclusion:

With the SilverStone NT03 being designed largely for HTPC (Home Theatre PC) purposes; a silent system is necessary when it comes to the computing needs. Unfortunately, when using two of these 60mm fans that are both pushing out 26.9dBA, we felt that it could have been quieter for our tastes but it managed to get the job done and it carried out its job well. On the other hand, for those seeking a quiet system they can simply drop the supplied voltage to the fans or use a single fan to push the air through the heatsink. Of course, if you are running a dual-core or high frequency CPU dropping the fan speed or eliminating one of the fans is not recommended. With the Pentium D 820 running at 3.36GHz (240 x 14), we were quite impressed with the temperatures we recorded in our labs today. In addition, the Nitrogon NT03 had a 3°C advantage over the CoolJag heatsink during idle and an impressive 5°C advantage while under load. In addition to its competitive cooling performance, the NT03 is composed of pure copper as well as all of the attached components to the heatsink are composed of metal rather than plastic, which also looked very attractive. Even though this may not be the quietest CPU heatsink on the market, it is compatible with nearly all of the major CPU sockets at this time, and offered the competitive level of performance we have come to expect from SilverStone Technology. It will be interesting to see what SilverStone engineers shall design next for their cooling line-up with the possibility of a NT04 coming about or perhaps they will venture into water cooling peripherals as they have recently pursuit into new areas of media storage as well as audio in the form of the EB01 USB digital to analog converter. Whatever may be in store for SilverStone Technology next, they certainly have a bright future ahead of them.

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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.