Silverstone NT05

Silverstone is a very well known maker of premium computer cases. The recently entered the cooling field and we have two coolers from them. The NT05 is the smallest cooler we tested in this roundup. It is ideal for small cases and tight space. However its small size reduces the surface area of the fins and minimizes the amount of possible heatpipes. The NT05 has the smallest fan of any heatsink we tested. Its 70mm cannot match the amount of air pushed by the 120mm fans of other premium coolers. The NT05 has three ‘U’ shaped heatpipes (which makes it 6 because they extend from the left and right.).


The NT05’s base isn’t finished very well. Our nickel is very blurry compared to other coolers we already discussed. This deficiency will hurt its performance on top of its already puny size. The NT05 comes with a backplate and screws for it to be mounted on sockets 775 and 754/939/AM2 motherboards. It also includes a hex key because the screws on the NT05 are not the standard Phillips head. Silverstone supplies a tube of thermal paste and instructions. A bonus with these coolers is a fan speed regulator that mounts in an expansion slot bay. Even though it would get tedious to reach behind your PC and tweak fan speeds, it is a nice touch nonetheless.

Installation

The installation of Silverstone’s NT05 is very simple. All you need is the cooler itself, the backplate and the hex key. Place the backplate under the motherboard and make sure the holes line up. Next place the heatsink on the CPU, line up the screws with the holes on the motherboard and use the hex key to tightly screw down the heatsink.

Even though the NT05 is the smallest heatsink we tested it has a rather large footprint, larger than some of the mammoth sized heatsinks. So make sure you have space around your CPU socket. Our EVGA 680i motherboard barely allowed the cooler to fit, leaving only 1-2mm from the cooler to the power regulators.