Stock performance surprised me somewhat. You can see the SilverStone AR02 performs way out of its league for its size and performance. Although the little 92mm PWM fan seemed to have quite an aggressive fan profile hence why the performance was so good. It beat its bigger sibling by nearly 2 degrees, strange but not surprising given the fan profile.
Here you can see the acoustic performance and as mentioned the fan profile was quite aggressive. Though that said everything under 45/44 dBA is practically inaudible, but we do record our acoustic measurements very close to the CPU cooler hence the large variation – the further away from the CPU cooler you get, the smaller the variation between CPU coolers is.
With overclocked CPU temperatures the thermal load ramps up a heck of a lot from the 80W region to around 150W as we use 1.3~ volts to churn out some serious heat. As you can see with that stock PWM fan profile the AR02 drops back quite a bit but still performs way out of its league in terms of performance for its size. Ramping up the fans and you can see the heatsink design SilverStone have used is epic because you can grab an extra 5 degrees performance between PWM and Maximum fan speed. This gives me hope for push pull users and SilverStone do provide the extra fan mounts for a second 90/92mm fan.
At 100% fan speed it was actually very loud, but obviously you’d expect that for 2800 RPM. Overall I was impressed by the noise/performance offering of the SilverStone AR02.
Another descent entry level cooler.
And, good review, ryan.
Although when compared o the price & performance with CM hyper 212 EVO, well, it doesn’t look as good as it really is.
Hyper 212 EVO is a 120mm based cooler, this is 92mm. Big difference.
Yeah that is, but don’t you think that these designs – are mostly inspired from good old hyper 212+?
Not at all. By that logic anything with a tower heatsink and a fan would constitute Hyper 212 imitation. Other companies released similar CPU coolers before cooler master. If anything this is closer to the Hyper TX3 which is Cooler Master’s triple heat pipe 92mm fan cpu cooler
Like the way he fan is attached. Seems very elegant as compared to the wire type. I just wonder how durable it is.