Asus Silent Night review

So you know the score by now - greater surface area means a greater ability to dissipate heat, and the Silent Knight CPU cooler has the surface area of a football pitch.

All right, that might be a wee bit of an exaggeration, but with six sausage-fat copper pipes transferring the molecular agitation we know as heat to the all-copper cooling ?ns, and a central, LED-lit ?n sucking cool air over said ?ns and blowing the warm stuff out the other side, the design is very heat-ef?cient.

It's also friendly to all recent ?avours of CPU platform - LGA775 (for Pentium 4 to Core 2 Duo), and on the AMD side, sockets 939, 940 and AM2. You'll have to pry your motherboard out to ?t the relevant backplate, every ?avour of which is included, so this isn't just a plug-and-play piece of technology.

However, this all-copper monster should see you through happily until your next PC, and a chassis with an acrylic side-panel will show it off to great effect. Best of all, it knocks, on average, 15ºC off your CPU's operational temperatures, which makes it an ideal overclocker's tool.

And if you've been keeping up with the Quad-Core news, you'll know how hot that chip gets, which makes this a near-as-dammit essential purchase.