SilverStone AR02 CPU Cooler Review

Stock performance surprised me somewhat. You can see the SilverStone AR02 performs way out of its league for its size and performance. Although the little 92mm PWM fan seemed to have quite an aggressive fan profile hence why the performance was so good. It beat its bigger sibling by nearly 2 degrees, strange but not surprising given the fan profile.

Here you can see the acoustic performance and as mentioned the fan profile was quite aggressive. Though that said everything under 45/44 dBA is practically inaudible, but we do record our acoustic measurements very close to the CPU cooler hence the large variation – the further away from the CPU cooler you get, the smaller the variation between CPU coolers is.

With overclocked CPU temperatures the thermal load ramps up a heck of a lot from the 80W region to around 150W as we use 1.3~ volts to churn out some serious heat. As you can see with that stock PWM fan profile the AR02 drops back quite a bit but still performs way out of its league in terms of performance for its size. Ramping up the fans and you can see the heatsink design SilverStone have used is epic because you can grab an extra 5 degrees performance between PWM and Maximum fan speed. This gives me hope for push pull users and SilverStone do provide the extra fan mounts for a second 90/92mm fan.

At 100% fan speed it was actually very loud, but obviously you’d expect that for 2800 RPM. Overall I was impressed by the noise/performance offering of the SilverStone AR02.