SilentiumPC Spartan 4 Air CPU Cooler Review

A Closer Look

Out of the box, your initial impressions are that this is quite a small air cooler. Although the Spartan 4 isn’t a low-profile design, it does have a somewhat ‘shrunken down’ feel from a larger design. This, by proxy, should allow for many of the benefits of larger coolers while still offering good compatibility in terms of chassis space and RAM compatibility.

Contact Plate

The Spartan 4’s contact plate has 2 copper pipes leading from each side of the cooler. These are nice and large which should allow for good movement of heat to the radiator.

While the contact plate doesn’t have a copper coating to match the heat pipes (which in theory would make it better in terms of heat transfer), you are presented with a very smooth surface that should, all going well, provide you will excellent contact to your CPU.

Radiator

As noted above, despite the initial appearance of it being a standard air cooler, the SilentiumPC Spartan 4 is surprisingly slim. Standing at just 134mm tall, this should provide an excellent solution for unforgiving cases or compact PC designs.

In terms of RAM compatibility, with you being able to install the fan on either side of the radiator, whether you prefer a push or full configuration, you shouldn’t have any problems what-so-ever getting this to fit with even some of the beefiest memory around!

In regards to the fins, these are set in a jagged style pattern and while we will be discussing these shortly later in the review (see installation) they do provide quite a pleasant aesthetic to the sleek stainless steel design.

Fan

As the Spartan 4 is a compact cooling solution, you’ll likely not be surprised to learn that rather than a standard 120mm fan, this instead comes with a 100mm design.

Despite this sounding like quite a small fan for an air cooler, as you can see in the picture below, this is still significantly larger than the radiator. While a lot of that fan area may seem like a waste, it’s choice has largely been reflected in the width rather than the height, but as noted above, there are plenty of options to install this fan where you like! Whether you have this as a push or pull configuration, however, this should provide some excellent airflow to the radiator.

A closer look at the fan confirms it to be a SilentiumPC own designed ‘Sigma Pro’. As a PWM design, this can alter it’s speed in a curved configuration to ensure that the airflow is always consistent depending on how hard your CPU is working and, by proxy, how warm things are getting.

“Efficient Sigma Pro 100 mm PWM oversized fan with a speed curve adjusted to ensure quiet operation in everyday use with popular processors.”

Overall

Despite the SilentiumPC Spartan 4 effectively being a ‘budget-friendly’ design, there is nothing within it that suggests that this cooler is ‘cheap’. In fact, it looks like a very effective air cooler that, while lacking any major aesthetics, has been designed to do a job in a sleek and quiet manner.

Are there any caveats hiding in it’s installation though? Well, there’s only one way to find out!