Asus Silver Knight

If looks matter more than performance for your HSF - then knock yourself out with this puppy.

Silver, Silver Knight, paint your palette copper and silver… or at least cool our cores effectively. ASUS’ latest HSF offering continues the tradition of including the fan inside the heatsink, while borrowing some heatpiping and fan-esque style design from Zalman. Of course the fan glows blue, as all high-end products are supposed to, naturally. If it doesn’t glow, it won’t work as effectively, you know.

To date ASUS has had mixed results with its coolers. The Silent Square Pro was excellent, weird interior fan and all, while the unreleased Chilly Vent and Chilly Vent Lux were unspectacular in the most spectacular way. With this in mind, we were curious to see which side of the fence the Silver Knight would sit on.

The retention bracket included is thankfully easy enough to set up and hook the cooler in to, and double thankfully ASUS has chosen to eschew Intel’s hopeless click lock mechanism in favour of screws and its own backplate.

Unfortunately up against our damsel in distress Chernobyl (a modified heat generator set to pump out 80W worth of CPU cloned calorific concoction) the poor Silver Knight didn’t do so well, producing a temperature of 52°C in an ambient temperature of 28°C – a 24°C difference, hardly impressive. Doubting what we saw, we cleaned off the base of the Silver Knight and contact slug on Chernobyl with Arctic Silver cleaning fluid and reapplied the thermal paste… to get the exact same result.

While the Silver Knight certainly has the looks, it doesn’t have the power to compete against today’s high-end coolers. Best to place your money on a Thermalright Ultra 120, Scythe Infinity or Noctua NH-U12F.