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Thermaltake K7 Silent Boost Review

The Company

Thermaltake was founded in 1999, and started off by producing the Orb series of aftermarket coolers. These were popular with people who wanted to overclock their GeForce 2's just a little bit more. Thermaltake went on to produce Socket A coolers, starting with the infamous core-cracking circular CPU Orb heatsinks.

Fast forward a few years, and Thermaltake comes out with the Volcano line of coolers, which were some of the first to incorporate a fan that was capable of being silent, but at the cost of cooling efficiency.

Fast forward again to today, and Thermaltake has introduced the Silent Boost line of coolers for the K7 (Athlon XP) and the K8 (Athlon 64/Opteron). Today we will be looking at the Athlon XP version and see whether or not a heatsink can be powerful and quiet at the same time.

The Heatsink and its Package

The Thermaltake Silent Boost comes in a blistering (loud? like do you mean fancy/exciting etc) package with an instruction booklet and a pack of generic white goop (thermal compound) to fill in the small gaps that exist between your processor and the heatsink. The heatsink is fairly hefty, weighing in at a shade under 500 grams.

The heatsink itself is made of pure copper, with a thin aluminium frame outside. The heatsink uses a system of 41 fins to disperse heat. Looking at the reflection of a penny, we see that the base of the heatsink is not a true mirror finish, and therefore it may require lapping. However, we will not lap it for this review as we want to see how it performs right out of the box.

The Fan

As you can see from the images, the fan is of an interesting design having slits on the sides. These slits combine to form the Hydro Wave component of the fan. These holes are supposed to reduce bearing stress, increase the amount of airflow and to minimize noise.

According to Thermaltake, the fan will only go up to 21 decibels, but after taking it off, we find that the fan is actually a Panaflo FBL08A12M, which is in fact specified to be 28db! I highly doubt mounting it onto a heatsink cuts the noise down, so we will assume 28 db until proven otherwise.