Ahh, we relish the simple pleasures in life don’t we? The excitement of a new state of the art game release, the thrill of OCing and benchmarking that new CPU, the ear piercing air cooled whine of your machine as it tries to keep from going nuclear… What’s that? You don’t enjoy that 80 decibal noise ordinance buster. Hmmm, come to think of it I don’t either. I mean, I want performance as much as the next guy but at what cost? Unfortunately, I’ve become so use to the noise of air cooling high end components that now it’s the silence that scares me. I equate silence with that infamous burning smell that means you are going to have a hardware funeral in your very near future.

So what are our options in bringing the silence back into our lives? If you have the money and the installation skills, then we can count water cooling as one option. However, that leaves a large group of people that either can’t afford to spend 200 – 300 dollars for the complete water cooled solution, or they are afraid of having their rig featured in “H2O nightmares gone wild”. If you are one of the people still firmly entrenched in the air cooling camp for whatever reason, then there is at least a ray of hope on the horizon. There are several new products that are arriving on the market that promise the return of decent cooling without the insane noise levels. Today we will be taking a look at one of these new products from Nexus Technologies. Specifically, we will be testing the PHT-3600 Intel P4 /Celeron socket 478 heatsink and Nexus’s claim that their SkiveTek manufacturing process will allow it to cool up to 3.2 GHz at an amazing 19dB (about the same as a whisper).