3, 2, 1… ladies and gentlemen, we have lift off… The Asus Silent Knight II

If anything, I have to be in the geekiest mood to write this… perhaps most ladies will take a detour out of this entry… nevertheless… I’ve got something pretty “cool” to rave about and here it is…

The Asus Silent Knight II. Probably be thinking “what a cheesy name…” but I find the name to be quite creatively appropriate. Its one of the quietest CPU coolers in the market emitting no more than 26 decibels. Yet… its so friggin huge…

Its surprising that this beast weighs just 610g, which is great because its so much easier to handle when you install it. There are some beefed up coolers that are just too heavy to the point that mounting it on the motherboard seems like it’ll just make the PCB snap. For those who are really lost reading this post, the Asus Silent Knight II is a CPU heatsink which is dedicated to ensure sufficient cooling on the processor chip in your PC. Processor chips (for e.g. Intel Core 2 Duo) run at extremely fast speeds which in turn generates a lot of heat. Without the heatsink to conduct heat away from the chip, its fry baby fry… I mainly decided to get this because since I’m planning to overclock my processor, its gonna need a very good cooler to preserve the lifespan of my $400+ chip.

Just look at it… its like some jet turbine engine out of an F-15… its got a little fan in between to suck in the cool air and expel the heat dissipated through the copper fins… this thing looks insane and yet it’s just a CPU heatsink.

However, I will also add, that I have never attempted to physically dismantle a PC before. But I finally got the chance to meddle around dismantling it in order to install the new heatsink.

Here’s what the inside of my PC looks like originally:

So I had to take out the side panel…

So its time to remove the original heatsink. Disconnect all the peripherals/cables and switch off the power… Just took a screwdriver to release the clipped heatsink on top of the processor chip… and then take out the old heatsink.

(above: taking off the heatsink revealing the heart of the system. Grey stain is actually thermal paste (acts to conduct heat between the chip and heatsink)

Up till this point it seemed pretty easy. Followed by taking out the processor,

(above: removing the processor. You must not touch the bottom of it… and hold it along the edges…)

I wiped off the old thermal paste with tissue and applied a fresh layer of it (using toothpick below)

And then remount it back onto the motherboard securely.

I felt pretty good at this point because it was the very first time I had physically handled a processor chip. Next thing was to disconnect all the cabling/video/audio cards and remove the whole motherboard from the PC casing… which was tricky as I had to remember where cables and connectors belonged to when I reassemble everything again after installing the heatsink (the Asus Q connectors helped a ton). Followed the instruction manual which was easy to use and understand, and managed to install the Silent Knight onto the board…

Now to get this whole thing back into the casing. Just look at how big the Silent Knight is… looks like some turbo afterburner that’s gonna make the motherboard lift off…

Now to reconnect back all the cables/screws/graphics/sound cards…

It was easier than I expected thankfully. Hence I tilted back the PC casing upright normally and moved on to connect the keyboards/mice etc… Powered on… vuala! It works!

The blue LED fan looks really cool and the airflow in the casing has also improved…

It was quite an interesting experience. Looking forward to overclock soon… =)