AllInfo

In the test 15 years ago: Asus & apos; first unsuccessful cooler

admin

The Silent Square Pro (test) not only had an interesting look, but was also Asus & apos; first unsuccessful cooler after initial failures like the Star Ice (test). The orange Silent Square Pro couldn't keep up with the inexpensive and consistently excellent competition from Scythe.

Table of contents

  1. 1 An unusual design
  2. A loud cooler with mediocre performance
  3. Conclusion

An unusual design

The Silent Square Pro had an interesting design that earned it the title “Cool Orange” 15 years ago thanks to the color scheme. The cooler had dimensions of 120 × 105 × 140 mm with a weight of 820 g. This put the Silent Square Pro on the heavier side of the models at the time. The waste heat was dissipated via five 6 mm heat pipes to the two cooling towers, each with 35 aluminum fins. A special feature was found in the built-in fan, which was mounted enclosed between the two cooling towers and covered on both sides by metal covers. Asus made the fan replacement extremely difficult because the metal covers were attached with special screws. The speed of the supplied fan was comparatively high at 2,500 rpm, which also had a negative effect on the volume. To prevent this, Asus included a 3.5-inch fan control that allowed the fan voltage to be continuously regulated between 5 and 12 volts.

  1. Complete scope of delivery

Image 1 of 11

Complete scope of delivery
Silent Square Pro
Orange fan cover
5-way heat pipe
high-quality finish, good material quality
3,5 & quot; Fan control with display
Central 92 mm fan with holding frame
Loud Sunon fans as standard setup
Dualeba -Hybrid-Tower
No incompatibilities with Silent-Square Pro

Asus couldn't shine with the Silent Square Pro during assembly. Due to the necessary backplate, the mainboard had to be removed in any case, even though Asus advertised the “simple assembly in three steps even without removing the mainboard” on its own website. The large number of small parts that were necessary for the installation of the cooler did the rest.

A loud cooler with mediocre performance

In terms of cooling performance, the Silent Square Pro placed in the middle of the field. With the standard fan at full speed, the temperature of the Pentium 840 Extreme Edition used was 66 ° C and thus one Kelvin behind a Scythe Infinity at 562 rpm. The generated sound pressure level was 50.1 dB (A) and thus almost 20 dB (A) more than with the Scythe Infinity. When the speed was reduced to 1,176 rpm, the volume of the Asus cooler dropped to 34.1 dB (A) and the CPU temperature rose to 74 ° C at the same time. Accordingly, the Silent Square Pro cooled louder than the throttled Scythe Infinity even at reduced speed and was a full nine Kelvin worse.

CPU cooler in performance comparison Unit: ° C

Conclusion

The name Silent Square Pro was very poorly chosen in view of the high volume of the cooler. Nevertheless, the cooler was the first from Asus that hadn't completely failed. For a price of just over 40 euros, the cooling performance, installation or other qualities of the Silent Square Pro could not convince – especially considering the competition in the form of the Scythe Infinity for less than 40 euros. All in all, the Silent Square Pro was a step in the right direction after the disastrous Star Ice, but it was too mediocre to actually be recommended.

In the “Test 15 years ago” category, the editorial team has been looking into the test archive every Saturday since July 2017. The last 20 articles that appeared in this series are listed below:

Even more content of this kind and many more reports and anecdotes can be found in the retro corner of the Com forum puterBase.

Exit mobile version