Silverstone Argon AR04 CPU Cooler Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

At $32.99 from Newegg and £29.99 from Overclockers.co.uk the Silverstone Argon Series AR04 Ultra-Low Profile CPU cooler isn’t exactly cheap, in fact I think it is a little expensive given its performance isn’t exactly mind-blowing. However, it is super slim and targeted towards a very different part of the market, that makes it a specialist product, and it’s not uncommon for a specialist product or solution to cost a little extra, so in that respect the price kind of makes sense. It performs good enough for the job and it fits into a thin mini-ITX chassis, something that not a lot of CPU coolers can do, even then you wouldn’t expect any better performance from anything else on the market in this size category.

Overview

I actually do like this CPU cooler, despite it not blowing me away in terms of price or performance. This is mostly because I understand its application and what Silverstone are trying to do here, it’s not the best CPU cooler on the market, far from it, but it is one of the best solutions on the market to a very specific problem. It’s not easy to get a good cooler into a slim mini-ITX chassis, their very nature is that they’ve got little to no space wasted on the interior and this means that this kind of system can be mounted in a car, on a monitors VESA mount, tucked out of the way, or even picked up and taken with you. This limited space means limited cooling and while some of these chassis features a passive cooler fitted into their overall design, you often need that little bit extra. The AR04 is a great little solutions for this part of the market and in this form factor, as 9 times out of 10 you’re going to do a lot better in terms of temperatures with air cooling that with passive cooling.

Noise is a bit of an issue here, but I wasn’t expecting a high RPM 80mm to be quiet anyway. The high fan speed is required to take care of the heat a lot more as there is very little overall surface area to the actual heat sink, so it’s important to transfer that heat away from the components as quickly as possible, the only downside of the is increased noise from the cooler. Most low power CPU’s that this cooler is designed for will likely not be run at max load that often, we’re talking about systems that can be used for remote access, POS displays, business solutions and Smart TV boxes, so effectively their biggest tasks will be playing videos, displaying images, loading word documents, maybe some light web browsing. In these scenarios you’re not going to be overclocking or maxing out CPU load and this means that you’ll spend 99% of your time running the fan at low speeds, where is was little more than a light whisper above ambient.

So overall, not a great CPU cooler, it’s a little warmer than I would like and it’s a little noisier than what would be ideal, but in the real world that doesn’t matter as we did put this cooler under a lot of stress, something it’s not really designed for. When it comes to low-end cooling in a compact system, it’s still going to be the best tool for the job.

Pros

• Ultra low profile design
• Good build quality
• Managed to keep an overclocked i5 stable

Cons

• Can get noisy at full load

Neutral

• Thermal performance isn’t impressive, but that’s understandable given the tiny size of the cooler
• Push-to-lock mounting clips are prone to breaking (not on this cooler, just one CPU coolers in general)

“When it’s installed in a slim case and you’ve finally got a cooler that can keep your low power Haswell chip company in your compact build, then you’ll be more than happy with what Silverstone have to offer and until there is a massive innovation in the world of cooling, you’ll struggle to find anything better in this form factor.”

Thank you Silverstone for providing us with this information.