A few weeks ago I took a closer look at a fan from a relatively unknown company by the name of Xilence. Not knowing what to expect I was presently surprised by the quite smooth performance of the fan. They also sent out one of their heatsinks called the Xilent Blade Pro for us to check out. Now that we are past the Christmas craziness, we are going to look and see how it performs compared to the other heatsinks that we have tested in the past. With a similar look to the Gelid Solutions heatsink we tested recently, I don't expect it to outperform the high end heatsinks, but I hope this will be a quite upgrade for a budget rig.
Review Sample Provided by: Xilence
Review by: Wes
Pictures by: Wes
Specifications
| Socket: | AM2, 754, 939, 940, LGA775, 478 |
| Overall Dimensions: | 132X126.5X116mm |
| Fan Dimensions: | 92 x 92 x 38 mm |
| Heatsink Dimensions: | 129 x 130 x 75 mm |
| Heatsink Material: | Copper Base, Aluminum fins and heatpipes |
| Net weight: | 471.5 g |
| Rated Voltage: | 12VDC |
| Operating Voltage: | 10.8 - 13.2 VDC |
| Starting Voltage: | 7VDC |
| Certificates: | CE |
| Rated Current: | 0.13 A ± 10% (MAX) |
| Power Input: | 1.56W |
| Fan Type: | PWM Fan |
| Bearing Type: | Hydro Bearing |
| Fan Speed: | 2300 rpm ± 10% (MAX) |
| Max. airflow: | 41.5 CFM |
| Noise Level: | 19 dB |
| Connector: | 4 pin |
Packaging
Sticking with their black and red theme Xilence packaged the Xilent Blade Pro in a black box with a silver bottom and red top. The front of the box has a window for you to be able to get a closer look at the Xilent Blade Pro, specifically they show off the four heatpipes. The other sides of the box have other good information like the specifications and features. Inside the heatsink was packaged in a clear plastic shell to keep it protected. The instructions and bag of parts could also be found tucked away with the plastic shell. I found the packaging to be more than enough to prevent any damage during shipping as well as open enough to get a good idea of what you are buying.
Our Test Rig
Abit IN9 32X-MAX 680i Intel Q6600 Quad core CPU B3 stepping running stock clockspeed 4 gigs of A-Data G Series Ram EVGA 8800GTS Video Card 640MB Antec Twelve Hundred Case Antec Quadro 850 Watt Power Supply Lite-On DVD Burner Running Vista Ultimate and XP
Installation
Jumping into the installation of the Xilent Blade Pro I was greeted with a pocked sized book for the instructions. All of the pages had clear pictures and instructions, the pictures where even in color! The install started off fairly normally with a backplate installation, I wish there was a better way to secure the heatsinks without having to pull out the motherboard. With the backplate installed I put our thermal paste on and prepared to secure the heatsink. This is when I noticed the extremely small amount of clearance around the thumbscrews used to tighten down the heatsink. I'm used to the clearance being tight, but this time around the size and height of the heatsink left no room at all. It was amazing at all that I was able to get them tightened, but of course I came out with a few to many cuts and scratches.
Performance
I ran our standard heatsink tests to get an idea of the Xilent Blade Pro's performance compared to other heatsinks we have tested. I ran all of our tests with the room at 70 to stay consistent. Using RealTemp to monitor the core temps I let the computer idle for an hour to get our idle numbers. The Xilent Blade Pro performed worse than the high end coolers but better than the v-1 and the stock cooler at idle. I then loaded up Prime95 on all four cores and warmed everything up a little bit. The load test results were very similar to the idle results. Even though the Xilent Blade Pro didn't perform as well as some of the other heatsinks it was amazingly quite.
Overall
Xilence's Xilent Blade Pro didn't perform as well as I had hoped but it would still be a noticeable improvement over a stock cooler. The Xilent did perform well in the noise department as the name suggested. The 92mm fan was silent even when running at full speed and because of Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) the fan only runs as fast as necessary. Unlike the simple installation of a stock Intel cooler I found parts of the installation of the Xilent Blade Pro to be frustrating and even painful. Overall, unless you are looking for a heatsink for a PC that noise is a major concern I would suggest you keep looking, Xilence makes a quality product but I believe the Xilent Blade Pro needs a few adjustments before I would recommend it to anyone.
