One of the biggest critiques that I have for most coolers on the market is the design of the clipping mechanism. A well designed or poorly executed clipping mechanism can essentially make or break a heatsink cooler design. The clipping mechanism on the Thermaltake Silent Boost HSF consists of a 3-lug style design, which covers all three clips on a CPU socket. There is a small opening which allows you to insert a flathead screwdriver and slowly install the heatsink in place without worrying about damaging a motherboard.

Testing:

In order to provide accurate test results, I choose to not use the included thermal compound that was supplied in the package. I will be using Artic Silver 3 in this round of testing for the Thermaltake Silent Boost HSF. A small portion of the compound was spread against the copper base using a plastic thin squeegee. For comparison I tested the Thermaltake Silent Boost HSF against Spire's 5F271B1L3 FalconRock II CPU Cooler. The test system consists of the following components:

• Asus AV7333 Motherboard
• AMD Athlon XP 1800+ CPU
• 512 MB Kingmax Tiny BGA DDR 333 RAM
• MSI G4 MX440 8X video card
• Maxtor D740X-GL 60 GB Hard drive
• D-Link DFE-530TX NIC card
• LG GCC-4120B Combination IDE Drive (12x8x32 CDRW + 8x DVD)

The "Burn-In Wizard" from SiSoft Sandra 2003 is used to put the CPU under concentrated load for a pre-determined amount of time. The options selected in "Burn-In Wizard" run the CPU and CPU Multimedia benchmarks for approximately 15 minutes. The system is left alone for approximate 15 minutes before the burn-in test is performed. Maximum temperatures are measured in degree Celcius and recorded for idle, full load, idle overclock and full load overclock using an independant thermal probe and Motherboard Monitor 5.3.4.0. The system was run in normal mode at 1.5 GHz and in overclocked mode (VCORE 1.8, FSB 142, Multiplier 11.5x) in order to get the system running at 1.6 GHz.