Processor cooling is a serious business these days and there is little room for sub standard performance. With such hot processors being produced by both AMD and Intel, the demand for high performance heatsinks has greatly increased. The average user is now turning to high-end air cooled heatsinks, where as the overclocks are heading straight for the water cooling kits. Recently reviewed high quality heatsinks from Swiftech and Thermalright have done a superb job of keeping the Intel Pentium4 560 processors temperature down. However, these products feature a retail value of roughly $60 US. Given a reasonably high-end processor costs around $300 US, adding another $60 US on top of this can start getting costly.

Ideally these expensive heatsinks are designed for the very latest processors. More to the point they are designed for users that are going to be dishing out the big bucks for ultra high-end processors. Those of us who are only going to be purchasing a mid range processor, such as a 3.0GHz Pentium4 LGA775 processor, will be after a cheaper heatsink. Unfortunately, even a 3.0GHz Pentium4 Prescott processor requires a great deal of cooling power, particularly if some overclocking is going to take place. Todays review will be looking at a slightly more affordable LGA775 cooler, aimed at the mainstream market.

Todays review item from Thermaltake is not only cheaper than previously reviewed heatsinks, but it is also designed to be much easier to install. Thermaltake have also gone with the Silent approach to cooling these hot LGA775 processors which is great. They have achieved this with a heatpipe design, just as Thermalright have. This year I have seen very few Thermaltake heatsinks, in fact I have seen very few Thermaltake products for that matter. Therefore, I am quite keen to discover just how well this new heatsink performs.

The Thermaltake LGA775 heatsink in question is known as the Silent 775 and is one of three LGA775 heatsinks offered by the company. The heatsink looks to be cleverly designed, offering one of the quickest and easiest non-standard installation processes seen to date. The Swiftech LGA775 installation is far too time consuming and difficult to be realistic. The Thermalright LGA775 installation was quite good but requires a number of parts to be installed individually. The Thermaltake LGA775 installation on the other hand is very simple; the back plate goes under the motherboard and the heatsink screws into it. The screws cannot fall out of the heatsink, meaning there are realistically just two components.