Silverstone Argon AR04 CPU Cooler Review

Performance

Unsurprisingly the AR04 isn’t very impressive under heavy load, but it’s still well within a safe margin for our CPU and it’s not a high performance focused product. Idle temperatures are decent, clocking in at just 6c above ambient.

Acoustics could have been better; at full load there was a noticeable fan noise from the system. The only plus I can see is that if you’re running a low power CPU and using this in a HTPC build then you’re likely not going to be running the CPU at full load very often, so you should expect to see noise levels closer to the idle dBA of 41.

The AR04 fell flat on its face in the overclocking test; by far the worst we’ve tested, but again this isn’t a bad result as it’s pretty much what I expect to happen. The plus side to this is that the CPU was still within a safe limit, and I didn’t have any stability issues benching at this level at all.

At 53dBA the fan was very noticeable. At max speed the fan isn’t something you’re going to want running (at least at this speed) while you’re working or watching a movie. It’s unlikely you’ll even run this CPU under these extreme conditions, we just wanted to see what it was capable of and while the fan did get loud, it did keep our CPU stable under a very heavy strain.