Written By:
Date Posted: July 22, 2002

Another thing that I found nice, and I have no idea if this is something to do with Akasa or with Sanyo (I would guess the latter) is that the fan has a coiled wire leading to a 3 pin plug. This goes a long way to tidying up the appearance and mess of wires you can get with some fans. Being a 3 pin plug means it's also easy enough to swap it for a 4 pin Molex connector whilst still retain the speed sensing of the fan should you so desire. There is however no need for this. The fan doesn't draw enough power to worry about killing off any motherboard headers. All in all a very good first look and first impression.

Testing

Ok, time to put this HSF through its paces. The test system is

Athlon 1.4 (1.75v)
Asus a7v266
Juno P4 Full tower (with side of case off)
Enermax Active PFC 350w with 92mm fan at 3000rpm

The side of the case is off because the case temperatures climb way to high with it on (I really need a new case). I tested the Silver Mountain 2Q against the Swiftech MC462 with an 80mm 4000rpm Coolermaster fan for comparison purposes. I tested with the Shin Etsu TIM's on both coolers and each cooler was allowed 24 hours to let the TIM "settle". For idle purposes, from a cold boot and into windows for 15 minutes, and for load purposes Quake III Arena was run in a looping demo for an hour.
I have only displayed the numbers with the Shin Etsu though as in my tests I could find no noticeable difference between the Artic Silver 2 and the Shin Etsu. I've also tested the Silver Mountain 2Q with a Delta 6000rpm "Screamer" basically just out of curiosity. This package is aimed at being a quiet cooler, but giving the delta numbers as well should be interesting to a few of you. Just an FYI here, AKASA markets this cooler with the Delta under the name AKASA Silver Mountain 2, so if you want the delta rather than the Sanyo Denki that's the name to look for. Ok enough talk, let's see some numbers.

And for those who prefer the Fahrenheit numbers...

After looking at the results you can see the Silver Mountain 2Q is a very strong performer, coming within 2 degree's of the Swiftech. It hasn't beaten it, but it was never designed for that. It was designed for quiet cooling and with that in mind the Silver Mountain 2Q does very well indeed. As for the actual noise of the HSF, my Enermax PSU 92mm Fan at full RPM is just slightly louder. The noise from the Silver Mountain 2Q is slightly quieter than my Swiftech with the Coolermaster fan (though the pitch is also higher). One of the best things about using the 80mm heatsinks is that you can use a low RPM (and therefore low noise) fan and still have good results. The Silver Mountain 2Q uses a 60mm Sanyo Denki fan but still doesn't sound any louder to me than the Coolermaster 80mm fan. As for its use with the Delta, as you can guess that was very loud, and defeats the entire purpose of this package entirely. The performance though is on par with the Swiftech.

Previous Page - Introduction

Next Page - Final Words