Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer review

While nVidia and ATi's high-end graphics cards are becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate on performance, the physical disparity between the GeForce FX and the Radeon couldn't be more pronounced. nVidia's high-end cards hog two PCI slots and, in the case of the much-maligned 5800, sound loud enough to occupy two whole houses.

Since ATi's cards are the quieter, it seems strange of Arctic Cooling to produce a replacement heatsink and fan for them. However, it's promoting the VGA Silencer as a near-silent cooler for Radeon graphics cards. Still, take one look at its considerable bulk and you'll find it impossible not to think this is cooler for those who really want to overclock their graphics card without turning the GPU into a cauldron of molten silicon.

The VGA Silencer comprises an 80mm fan and heatsink. The translucent blue plastic fan sits semi-enclosed in a scooped frame at one end. It then pushes cool air down the huge silver extruded aluminium heatsink that runs the whole length of the graphics card. Although it's very large, for the most part it sits well clear of the card's electronic bits and bobbles, as it only reaches down for contact with the GPU core itself.

The VGA Silencer is theoretically compatible with all the Radeons from the 9500 onwards, as ATi's designs have been relatively consistent, using a compact GPU chip and two diagonally opposed holes for attaching the heatsink. It's worth checking online (www.arctic-cooling.com) to see if there are any idiosyncrasies regarding the design of your particular board, but we didn't have problems fitting it to either a 9500 or 9700 Pro.

Installing the VGA Silencer was an easy, five-minute job. Once the old one was removed, it was simply a matter of fixing the cooler in place by aligning it with the GPU, then screwing a clamp onto the back side of the card through the existing retention holes. The VGA Silencer is light, thanks to its aluminium construction, so it felt very securely attached. The card's bracket also has to be replaced, as the VGA Silencer takes up two backplates: one backplate for the standard D-SUB, S-Video and DVI outputs, and one for the heatsink and fan to push hot air through.

Once the device is installed, you may well be horrified at the similarity between your once neat and compact Radeon and the considerably larger and more aggressive-looking GeForce FX 5800. Fortunately, the VGA silencer is both light and quiet. There's a switch for high or low fan settings, but even on high it's difficult to make it out over the average noise of a PC.

Good acoustics are always welcome, but the majority of people fitting this cooler are clearly going to be hoping for excellent overclocking too. To test this, we used ATiTool (atitool.ocfaq.com) to turbocharge a Radeon 9700 Pro. With the new cooler installed, we managed to push the GPU speed up from 325MHz to 370MHz. This gave us an extra 11fps in Unreal Tournament 2003, a considerable performance jump. Although we could take the core speed faster than this, there didn't seem to be any extra performance to be had. As with all overclocking, increasing the speed of one component, such as the GPU, has a limited effect, as most parts of the system depend upon each other. As well as overclocking the GPU, the memory will also need to run faster. Unfortunately, the VGA Silencer provides no extra help for the Radeon's RAM, which does limit its potential.