All I can say is wow. For a HTPC cooler, we are seeing temperatures that compete with high end tower heatsinks. What is also incredibly pleasing to see is that the bottom up fan combination actually works better than the top down. This mean HTPC users will get better performance with a smaller height cooler – something that makes no logical sense to me but is great news for the consumer.
Overclocking saw the cooler drop a few places down but nothing drastic. We are seeing temperatures just 1 degree behind Sapphire’s Vapor-X CPU cooler and 2 degrees ahead of Spire’s TME III dual fan cooler. The six 6mm heat pipes on the SilverStone NT06 are clearly doing a fantastic job and the fact the bottom up fan combination works better than the top down would suggest SilverStone have optimised the design of this product for HTPC cases that require low profile CPU coolers.
The SilverStone NT06 blitzes its main competitors in terms of performance, the Noctua NH-L12 and the Shadow Rock TopFlow, but can it win on the acoustic performance as well?
Looks like Silverstone did a pretty decent job of this cooler all round. Quite impressive.