Silverstone Argon AR04 CPU Cooler Review

Introduction

While we have a lot of love for huge, powerful and overclocked gaming rigs here at eTeknix, it’s not always the best way to approach each system build. Sometimes you need to wind back the scale of your system and go for something compact and sleek, and that’s where products like the Silverstone AR04 comes into play. Designed for ultra-low profile chassis designs, the AR04 is ideal for compact builds such as HTPCs , integrated systems used for advertising, NAS builds and even low-power office systems. There are many reasons why you may need a slim chassis or suffer an internal height restriction, especially on M-ITX Slim motherboards and it’s for these systems that Silverstone have designed the AR04.

Silverstone have proven time and time again that they know how to make a great products, and while I’m not expecting this to be anything incredible, I’ll still be looking for the same attention to detail that we’re used to seeing from Silverstone. This cooler being built to a design that is small and compact will no doubt impact its cooling performance, as it’s tiny and has a tiny fan, so it’s hardly going to blow us away in terms of performance. Of course it wasn’t designed for heavy overclocking, it was designed to get the job done where space is limited, so as long as the performance is reasonable, we could have a great value product on our hands.

The Argon series cooler stands at just 23mm tall, features two direct contact 6mm heat-pipes, a custom 80mm fan and is suitable for Intel LGA1150, LGA1156 and LGA1155 CPU’s up to 65w. Currently the cooler will set you back around £29.99 and that means it is a little more expensive that other slim Silverstone coolers, but this one is just that little bit slimmer than most others.

It comes in a compact box which details the main specifications (see above) and that it is suitable for Intel Thin Mini-ITX boards, DH61AGL & DQ77KB.