FPSLabs : ASUS Silent Square Pro Review

The Silent Square Pro is as top of the line as ASUS’s thermal solutions get. Can this massive heatpipe tower keep up with the competition with just an internally-mounted 92mm fan?

Category: Cooler
Manufacturer: ASUS
Product: Silent Square Pro
Gallery: Click Here
Price: $59.80

Keeping track of everything that’s going on in the hardware world can
be a daunting task. We make extensive use of xml feeds and frequently
visit the websites of all the hardware manufacturers we can think of,
but still there are product releases that slip, silently,
under our radar. Of course we hit the big launches; processors from
Intel and AMD, video cards from ATI and NVIDIA; and even smaller things
like motherboard launches, new mice and keyboards, and even mousepads.
The trickiest part of finding the smaller releases is that they are
often carried out by companies that are not particularly well known for
making the kind of product being released.

And
for some reason it always seems like the products that we miss are in
fact gaming related in some way. Companies often create a family of
components under a certain label in order to associate them with the
gaming and/or enthusiast market. We have seen this time and time again
from the Fatal1ty series of products from XFX, Abit, and Creative,
as well as more straight-forward approaches like ASUS’ Republic of
Gamers series and Foxconn’s upcoming Quantum Force line. We always knew
ASUS made CPU coolers, but we never really considered them to be in the
upper echelon of manufacturers in the field. From the specs listed for
some of the coolers on their website,
it is quite clear that ASUS means to change our premonitions. The ASUS
Silent Square Pro stands at the top of the cooler totem pole at ASUS,
figuratively and literally. This giant heat pipe tower has a lot of
interesting features that distinguish it from its competition, but do
they help ward off heat? Let’s take a closer look.

{mospagebreak heading=Introduction&title=Features and Specifications}
Features and Specifications
Deviating rather significantly from the standard heatpipe tower design,
the Silent Square Pro, at first glance, appears to be missing a fan. In
reality, however, the fan is internally mounted such that two separate
banks of 35 convection fins act to cool five heatpipes each. The five
heatpipes on the SSP go from the top of cooler down through the base
and up through the other side of the fins. Due to the fan not being
directly exposed to cool air the air flow through the fins appears to
be quite low, but this is expected from a relatively low RPM (2500 max)
92mm fan. On the rare occasion that the fan is needed to run at full
speed, it can get a little bit loud, certainly not the “silent” that
the product’s name suggests. Most of the time, however, the fan does
not run at full speed and is very quiet, certainly no louder than other
components in the system.

As far as packaging is concerned, the SSP is placed in a protective
plastic clamshell casing, which is then inserted into a relatively
thick cardboard box with a handle and very small viewing window. The
plastic clamshell seems to be situated in a way that allows it to
provide fairly decent shock absorption, while the cardboard surrounding
the plastic is capable of diverting any sharp objects or taking the
blow of any bumps that the cooler might experience in transit. The box
is also themed appropriately for the cooler within, sporting an orange
deco and a picture of the contents.

The contents within the package are superb and really emphasize the
same attention to detail that ASUS takes with all of their products.
The package includes the cooler, a series of universal mounting
brackets, an alternative installation method and corresponding parts
for LGA775 applications, a small tube of thermal grease, the
installation manuals, and a free fan controller. The fan controller is
only capable of controlling one fan, but is not exclusive to the fan
included with the SSP. It is also nice to see a fan controller without
all the flashy excess that has become commonplace amongst such devices
these days. The installation method itself, speaking strictly about the
LGA775 application, is quite honestly the best we have ever seen from a
cooler. It consists of a mounting base that is secured to a universal
backplate with a substantial amount of cushion. The two pieces are
separated unyieldingly by four plastic spacers that ensure the bracket
is evenly mounted in place. The remaining component is a simple clip
that applies pressure at the very center of the base of the cooler. The
thing that makes this a great method is the tolerance built in to the
design. When placing the cooler in the mounting bracket, there is
absolutely no room for a mistake. If the cooler is positioned
incorrectly, you will not be able to complete the installation. The
result is, by our best evaluation, a close to perfect installation each
and every time. Removal of the cooler after installation only enhances
our opinions about the installation method, as the thermal grease is
spread very evenly and cleanly in the middle of the processor. What
performance increase the thermal grease being spread correctly has on
the overall cooling properties of the device is not something we can
test conclusively in the lab, but we struggle to think that any kind of
negative impact could result.

Source: Asus.com

While the Silent Square Pro is undoubtedly a LARGE cooler, most of its
size seems to be in the height dimension rather than width or length.
As a result, there is very little chance of the cooler being
incompatible with common motherboards, or there being space concerns of
any sort for any other component in the system. In contrast with the Vigor Monsoon II Active TEC Cooling solution, the SSP does not interfere with heatsink-endowed memory modules, such as Corsair’s Dominator and OCZ’s Reaper HPC series.

The Silent Square Pro stands as somewhat of an orange monolith, its towering height besting even that of the OCZ Vindicator. Some people may question the color of the Silent Square Pro (SSP), but PC Power & Cooling’s Silencer 750
power supply proved that the copper-looking finish ends up
complimenting other parts of the computer quite well. Looks are not
something we particularly care too much about when reviewing a cooler,
though it can speak volumes about its quality of manufacturing.
Overall, the aesthetics of the SSP can be summed up in one word: swanky.
The unit we received appeared to be free of any manufacturing or
shipping-induced flaws. While we obviously can’t guarantee that all of
these coolers ship in this manner, there do not appear to be any
packaging problems that could lead to damage.

{mospagebreak title=Testbed and Methods}
Testbed and Methods
Test Setup

Case: Vigor Force
Power Supply: Cooler Master Real Power Pro 850
Motherboard: Foxconn N68S7AA
Processor: Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700, varying MHz
Hard Drive: Western Digital WD2500KS 7,200RPM
Video: NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTS
Sound: Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic
Physics: ASUS PhysX P1
Memory: 2048MB (2×1024MB) G.Skill PC2 6400
Optical Drive: Lite-ON SHW160P6S05
Cooling: Vigor Monsoon II, OCZ Vindicator, Intel HSF (stock), Cooler Master Sphere

Hardware Settings

CPU Voltage (before droop): 1.35V (stock speed), 1.625V (overclocked)

Software Configuration

Operating System: Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2
Video Driver: NVIDIA ForceWare Version 158.22 (May 17 release)

Our current testbed for coolers is based on NVIDIA’s 680i platform that
is known to have an excellent capacity for overclocking quad core Intel
processors. The nTune utility that is available as an add-on to the
nForce driver suite is also a fairly good monitoring tool, though we
would not say the same for its other features. Unfortunately, all of
the above holds true for motherboards based on NVIDIA’s reference
design – those from eVGA, XFX, and BFG. Unfortunately Foxconn, the same
company that OEM’s the NVIDIA reference design (and subsequently the
motherboard for each of the aforementioned companies), has chosen to
depart from this reference design with their N68S7AA. The main change
lies not in the physical configuration of the board, though that is
slightly augmented for the better, but the BIOS. Foxconn’s use of the
American Megatrends BIOS is definitely a step in the wrong direction,
as overclocking options (thanks in large part to Foxconn’s insistence
on including the FOX Central Control Unit) are severely crippled on
this version of the board. The motherboard is not “bad” by any stretch
of the imagination, it is just not ideal for our purposes in this
testbed. FPSLabs usually just plays with the hand it’s dealt, and
that’s exactly what we’re doing here. When we get a chance to move to a
more standard motherboard for the cooling testbed, we will certainly
jump all over it. Furthermore, until we get some thermocouple
thermometers to get truly accurate physical temperatures at repeatable
locations on the CPU in the general area, we will be using software
monitoring. To better provide for software testing, we are going with
Intel’s Core 2 Extreme QX6700 processor, as the Core 2 family has a
fairly reliable and accurate on-die temperature diode for each core.
The program we will be using to monitor the temperature in Windows is RightMark CPU Clock Utility.
This utility not only measures load and temperature on each core
independently, but also provides a graph to record temperature variance
over time.

To generate the load, we will be using an application called BURNK6.
BURNK6 was developed in the days of AMD’s K6 core, but works
conveniently well with Intel’s latest processors as well. BURNK6 has
been proven by industry professionals such as Gabe Rouchon of Swiftech
to be extremely effective at loading the CPU in a manner from which the
greatest amount of heat is generated. The load generated by BURNK6,
which is available as part of the CPUBURN package,
remains constant over time, rather than slightly fluctuating such as
with Prime95 and/or ORTHOS. A separate instance of BURNK6 will be used
for each core on the processor, in this case four. Temperatures will be
read from the RightMark CPU Clock Utility after 10 minutes of load (and
idle) and the average temperature across all four cores will be
reported. Temperatures will be recorded at idle and 100% load for each
cooler tested in a given review. The processor will be overclocked to
the point of failure with each cooler, and the maximum clock speed will
be recorded.

{mospagebreak title=Temperature Testing}
The Test
With each cooler we test, we are able to add another set of data points
on our cooling performance charts. It is very convenient to have a
system with a constant lineup of components to test these coolers on,
as individual results from one test at FPSLabs can be compared to the
corresponding results of another.

**Please note that all of our testing was done on a quad-core
processor with a 120W TDP (actual value is more likely around
140-150W). Quad-core processors (specifically, Kentsfield-based chips
from Intel Corp) produce quite literally twice the heat as their
dual-core brethren, and as such require the use of different cooling
philosophies. There are different types of heat transfer. Coolers
reviewed on sites like Anandtech will receive final results different
than those shown on our site because Anandtech uses a dual-core
processor for all of their thermal tests (as of writing, September 07).
Typically, coolers that score very well on Anandtech are capable of
moving (smaller amounts of) heat very quickly and also getting rid of
it quickly through convection, thus producing lower temperatures. Such
coolers might not necessarily perform well at FPSLabs because the
processor we use to test produces far more heat and is a much more
stressful task for the cooler. Thermal solutions that perform well in
our tests might not move heat as quickly as top-performing coolers on
Anandtech, but far more heat is being moved and removed, just at higher
overall temperatures.

This
cooler was extremely impressive in our thermal testing. Not only did it
trump even the Monsoon II Active TEC Cooling solution from Vigor Gaming
at idle conditions, it also beat that augmented cooler, albeit by a
small margin, under load. This is a tremendous feat for any pure air
cooler, especially one with a 92mm fan. Not once during testing did the
cooler - at least the parts of it we were able to reach - get warm to
the touch. The exhaust coming from the back of the cooler was nowhere
near as warm as with the Monsoon II, which adds an extra 50W of heat to
the mix from its integrated TEC plate. Also, please remember that the
testing methodology we use calls for reading temperatures from the
on-chip diode that reports the Tjunction temperature of the processor.
As this diode is part of the actual CPU die itself, the temperatures it
reports, we feel, are very important. However, the temperatures
reported from this diode are no more valid than temperatures reported
from any other method of measurement. As long as all measurements from
a set of data are taken from the same point using the same method, then
they should still report equally valid results.

The noise level of the SSP under heavy load is tolerable but definitely
not silent as the name of the cooler suggests. The 92mm fan, which must
run at much higher RPM than 120mm fans to push the same airflow, is
obviously the culprit here. However, the fan on the SSP runs far
quieter than the 92mm fan on the Vigor Monsoon II, which ramps to
3500RPM (compared to 2500 on the SSP) and produces a sound akin to a
jet engine.

Our overclocking experience with the SSP was an interesting one, and we
went about it slightly differently than we have in the past. Our first
overclocking attempt was at 3701MHz at settings we know to work
flawlessly with the components we use. The system booted into Windows
XP just fine and was very stable. After monitoring the temperatures at
this speed for quite some time, we were convinced that this cooler
would allow a bit more overclocking headroom. First, however, we wanted
to see if we could get the processor to run at 3701MHz (285×13) at a
lower voltage. The system would load Windows but fail whenever a
benchmark was run to verify stability. We then bumped the voltage back
up and went straight for 3750MHz, a departure from our normal practice
of 15MHz (or 13 in this case) increments. When the system booted just
fine with basically no increase in reported temperatures, we became
pretty excited about the possibility of getting this chip into the
3.9-4.0GHz range. The next step was to 3850MHz, and the system booted
just fine. After about 5 minutes of idle operation with relatively low
temperatures, we received a blue screen. This was repeated several
times until we lowered the clock speed to 3800MHz (293×13) for stable
operation. We actually were able to play Team Fortress 2
for several hours at this clock speed to prove stability. The maximum
overclock achieved on the Silent Square Pro is a full 100MHz beyond the
previous best result. Pretty impressive to say the least.

{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion
The Silent Square Pro is another product from ASUS that has done
nothing but impress us. The quality of craftsmanship was evident the
second we took it out of the package, and the performance the cooler
ultimately displayed is undeniable. The package contents are very
comprehensive, and a simple yet elegant fan controller is also
included. We were perhaps most smitten with the installation of the
Silent Square Pro, which seems to be completely idiot-proof: if you
screw up, it won’t work; if you do it right, it works great. The design
of the cooler is unique enough to allow ASUS to differentiate it from
the rest of the field, yet not so radical that the tried and true
performance of the heatpipe tower design is compromised. At $59.80, you
will be hard-pressed to find any cooling solution that performs this
well on quad-core processors. For dual-core processors, however, the
Silent Square Pro is probably not the best choice. The lower thermal
design power of dual-core chips means that smaller, more moderately
priced air coolers can perform just as well if not better than the
Silent Square Pro. While such coolers might struggle if not fail while
trying to cool a quad-core processor, they may well be an overall
better choice.

As much as we like the Silent Square Pro, there are two important
issues – only one of which we came across – that we have with the
cooler. The first issue is regarding noise. While not the loudest
cooler we have tested (that distinction belongs to Intel’s stock
HSF/leaf blower), the Silent Square Pro, under heavy load, is not
exactly what we would call Silent. The fan being encased within the
design itself certainly does wonders for keeping everything quiet, but
it is not enough to dampen the noise produced under 100% operation.
This problem might be something that could be fixed on the fan
selection level, but 92mm fans in general produce more noise to
generate the same airflow as their 120mm counterparts. If the size of
the SSP would not be affected too much by such a change, we would
recommend a 120mm fan be incorporated into the design in place of the
current 92mm fan. The second issue we have is in regards to size. While
not excessively wide or long by any stretch of the imagination, the SSP
is enormously tall. So tall, in fact, that it will have a hard time
fitting in some cases, particularly those with
modifications/augmentations to the side panel. We had no issues with
this cooler in our Vigor Force Screwless Gaming Chassis, but we can see this being a problem with thinner enclosures.

In the end, the Silent Square Pro from ASUS is the best cooler we have
tested to date for quad-core processors and is definitely worthy of
your consideration if you are in the market.

Pros
+ Great design
+ Quality craftsmanship
+ Excellent cooling performance
+ Superior package contents
+ Solid installation method
+ Reasonably priced
+ Will not interfere with surrounding motherboard components (on almost all motherboards)
+ Quiet except when fan is at 100%
Cons
- Fan can be loud at 100%
- Probably not the best choice for dual core
- Very tall; might not fit in most cases
Rating
9.8 out of 10

While the Silent Square Pro is an amazing cooler, its performance
increase over our previous top performer is not quite enough to give it
our Editor’s Pick award for Air CPU coolers. There is a good chance
that we will come back and give this cooler the Editor’s Pick award,
but for now there are still tons of Air CPU coolers out there earning
quite an impressive reputation - some of which are on their way here as
we speak. We’ll make sure to let you know in future articles where the
SSP stands in the great scheme of things. Hopefully you take from this
review the knowledge that the ASUS Silent Square Pro is a cooler worthy
of any moderate overclocker’s system.

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