As far as straight air cooling goes, I am pretty sure that we are reaching the plateau for performance. We have explored many different materials, configurations and airflow designs. Aside from advanced technology such as heatpipes or thermal-electric cooling, your basic HSF can’t really get much more efficient so what is a manufacturer to do in order to stand out in the crowd? There are several aspects that can make or break a coolers reputation once the performance threshold levels out, some of the new criteria could be: aesthetics, noise, build quality, weight and mounting clip design. When I was contacted by Dave from QuietPC with the proposition to review a cooler from a new player in the game, I jumped at the chance since I am familiar with their dedication to promoting solidly performing, noise free solutions. A week later, UPS dropped off a plain brown box from them. Thanks Dave.

A glance at Arctic Cooling’s website offers the following specs and description of their Copper Silent 2L, which is the model on test today... Basic cut and paste follows...

Main Features

44 x 44 x 5 mm of Copper Plate
Contrary to heat sinks which use a copper core (copper poured inside aluminium), for the Copper Silent 2 we use more material over the DIE where high energy flows (copper plate) and in the external areas where low energy flows, less material (only 5mm aluminium plate). Thus we achieve a better efficiency, hence better cooling performance without increasing the weight.

Tin Connection between Copper and Aluminium
The heat transfer of conventional copper cores onto aluminium is ensured by thermal compound, which transfers the warmth extremely poorly compared to metals. In contrast to this we use a super-thin tin film. This has the advantage of approx. 25-times higher heat conductivity of tin compared with the thermal compound.

Low Profile
Compared to the Copper Silent the cooling performance was improved, without increasing the height of the heatsink or violating the height restriction area defined by AMD. Thus compatibility is guaranteed for all Socket A mainboards. Thanks to the reversed fan mounting, the relevant airflow height of 56mm is kept low.

Extremely Quiet
The Second Revision of the Copper Silent 2 allowed for the ventilationsystem to be reworked. The patented "reversed- hanging" fan is able to practically eliminate the typical buzzing sound of 80mm fans.

Fan Mounting
The Fan has been mounted onto 4 Rubber supports to stop vibrations being transmitted to the heat sink.

Clip
Owing to the screwdriver guidance and the joint both the installation was simplified significantly as well as the de-installation and is now even possible under extremely close space conditions in the PC Case.

Naturally the Copper Silent 2 utilizes all 6 hooks of the socket, which leads as with our predecessor models to a low socket strain.

Time to tear into the plain brown wrapper and see what it has to offer

Retail Package