If you stick a 25mm thick Delta fan on any heatsink it is going to make noise, and the Akasa Silvermountain is no exception.The 6800RPM Delta fan generates a lot of extra noise in the computer system. For those of you who are used to this level of noise this will be nothing new naturally. Delta fans have become the default standard for performance cooling for the most part - that is beginning to change as the larger, 37mm models start to arrive though.

Be sure to click on the little pair of headphones and listen to this heatsink for yourself. The sound clip is about 10 seconds long and lets you hear both startup and power down of the entire heatsink and fan combination.

FrostyTech Acoustic Sampling Chamber (~10 sec)
Spectral view.
Standard Waveform view. (Listen to an MP3 recording of this heatsink by clicking on the headphones)

Synthetic Temperature Test Results: *Ranked according to 100W small interface die test results.

FrostyTech Synthetic Temperature Test Platform Results
	Mfg.	Model	Ambient Temp.	27mm large copper block	15mm small copper block		27mm large copper block	15mm small copper block	Thermal pad	No. Fans	Fan Noise	Clip force
				50W	50W		100W	100W
1	Thermal Integration	TI-V77L	26.5	39.1	44.4		57.5	63.6	grey	1	med	med
2	Vantec	CCK-6027D	27.4	45.4	49.6		64.9	73.4	none	1	med	med
3	OCZ	Dominator	26.5	37.7	50.9		52.4	74.2	none	1	loud	med
4	Akasa	Silver Mountain	26.6	46.2	51.5		65.0	76.1	none	1	loud	med
5	Vantec	CCK-6035D-Retail	26.5	44.2	52.8		63.2	77.9	none	1	loud	med
6	Thermaltake	Volcano 6cu+	26.5	40.3	55.3		58.6	84.4	carbon	1	loud	med
7	Spire	5T060B1H3R	26.7	42.7	57.5		64.6	85.1	none	1	low	med
8	Fortis	A92	26.7	45.6	65.8		67.8	97.8	none	1	loud	stiff
				50W	50W		100W	100W

The solid copper construction plays its part well as most of the top performing heatsinks in this set of reference cooler is compliant. In this case the Akasa Silvermountain comes in at the fourth position with some very good cooling numbers.

The Fortis cooler rounds out the list in OEM class position and the Thermaltake and Spire sit in the good solid performance category. On a side note, our heatsink tests are now done and both 50W and 100W loads and we have also moved from thermistors to thermocouples which have a wider temperature range.