Gelid Solutions Black Edition CPU Cooler Review

According to our contacts at Gelid Solutions, The Black Edition CPU cooler will hit the UK market at approximately £44.99-49.99, €59.99 if you live in Europe and $74.99 if you live in the USA. Therefore we can see that this dual tower dual fan CPU cooler from Gelid is priced competitively with similar products; the Be Quiet Dark Rock Pro 2 (£60-65) and the Sapphire Vapor-X (£50-55). It also performs closely to similarly priced products like the Corsair H55 (£50-55), the Cooler Master Seidon 120M  (£45-50) and the Scythe Mugen 3 (£40-45).

As always I will start with my concerns, before shifting on to what I liked most about this product. Firstly, I am slightly disappointed that the Black Edition blocks a RAM slot. While it blocks less RAM slots than some similar dual tower/dual fan products (i.e Be Quiet! Dark Rock Pro 2 and Evercool Silent Shark) it has been shown before that high performance doesn’t necessarily have to block any RAM slots at all (Sapphire Vapor-X and Thermalright Macho are good examples of this). Therefore it is of my opinion that Gelid could have revised the design slightly to offer 100% RAM compatibility. My second concern is that mounting the central fan is a very tricky procedure. The fan clips are only too quick to spring off and you have to do both sides at once because once the fan is installed all the fan mounting holes get blocked. My third concern is that at low fan speeds, the Gelid Black Edition does actually provide quite mediocre performance. Now the caveat to this is that you do get absolute silence, and the performance can easily be boosted by increasing the fan speeds slightly to levels that still offer competitive acoustic performance with competing products. You can also add a third fan but obviously this would add extra cost.

On the positive side I feel Gelid Solutions have offered an excellent product in the air heatsink market. The Black Edition offers a very competent level of performance for its size and cost and has a staggering amount of flexibility between total silence and maximum performance. The mounting mechanism is simple and effective (excluding the central fan) and all the parts used seem to be of high quality and look well finished. The inclusion of GC-Extreme thermal paste is the deal sweetener, because what we don’t point out is that thermal paste can make up to 10 degrees difference in terms of overclocked load performance. The thermal paste most companies provide is rubbish at best, whereas GC-Extreme is superb. Thus I believe this inclusion alone is saving consumers around £5-10 (how much it would cost to buy GC-Extreme separately) because many of you take for granted the fact we use Gelid GC-Extreme in all of our testing, yet all companies do not provide thermal paste this good (or even close).

The included fans are also very good. The central fan is particularly powerful but the side fan is slightly weaker due to its thin design. However, the thinner design means better RAM compatibility and reduced acoustics. Consequently, I think the balance Gelid have achieved between noise, performance and functionality is actually spot on. Finally, as always, the aesthetics are left down to your own personal preferences but I think Gelid have done a good job in providing both a clean, and gamer style CPU cooler. The only caveat to this, as mentioned earlier, is that the Black Edition seems to be coloured mainly Silver rather than Black, however this doesn’t detract from the product in any way.

Awarding this product is not exactly tough. It excels in the market it has been deployed in, which is the dual tower dual fan air heatsink market. It offers excellent performance, excellent acoustics, or a good combination of both, the ability to add a third fan, a stylish design, top-of-the-line thermal paste and most importantly a reasonable price point. Therefore it is without hesitation that I award “The Black Edition” CPU cooler from Gelid Solutions the eTeknix Editor’s Choice award.