It’s all well and good having high-end graphics cards with 24 pipes and high clock frequencies, but in most cases the stock cooling, though acceptable, is usually just that - acceptable. The X850 series, for example, can hit well over 80°C at load with the stock cooler and though this is well within the thermal limits of the GPU, it’s not exactly optimal and can add unnecessary heat to your case, too. In extreme cases it could even shorten the potential life span of that £400 card you just bought with your hard earned cash.

Arctic Cooling was founded in 2001 but really hit the big time in 2003 with the release of the VGA Silencer Rev.3, which became the graphics card accessory to buy if you owned a 9700/9800 Pro. Back then graphics cards were noisy. They had no fan speed controller circuitry and so would run at full pelt whether you were in Windows or in a D3D application. Nvidia were the first to change things with the FX series by adding temperature controlled fan speed circuitry but there fan choice was noisy and it didn’t really do the job well. Since then, Nvidia have improved there cards stock cooling performance and are in my opinion well ahead of ATI in this respect.

That’s not to say there isn’t room for improvement. Overclocking has most definitely hit the main stream in the last two years with everyone from the seasoned computer enthusiast and his grandparents at it, and so cooling and the understanding of its vital role is very important to many more people than it once was.

The other area where there is room for improvement, but for a different group of users is the noise levels of the stock coolers. Nvidia are well ahead of ATI in this respect, too. We’ll have to see what the X1000 series brings to the table.

In this review I’ll be looking at the new NV Silencer 5 Rev.3 from Arctic Cooling, which is now compatible with the 7800 series. We’ll be answering the question of whether this third party cooler is worth the money over the impressive stock cooler on the 7800 GT and if noise levels can be decreased with a few tweaks to make this a serious option for quiet PC’s.

Before we move on though, I must mention that a 7800 GT has two fan speed modes depending on what you are currently running on your PC - 2D or 3D. Nvidia cards run at considerably lower clock speeds (275/1000) while in 2D and only jump to full clock speeds (400/1000) when in 3D. 2D mode has a low, quiet fan speed setting while 3D increases the fan speed and noise levels. As the NV Silencer 5 is built to connect to the same fan header as the stock cooler it will act the same as above but we will do more than test at stock fan speed settings.

In this review we will be looking at the coolers performance using different fan settings so to give a broad amount of results for all different types of users. More details on how we tested this cooler can be found later in this review!