Gelid Silent Spirit CPU Cooler Review

If upon first seeing the Silent Spirit your first thought is “someone took a hammer too a AC Freezer 7 Pro and bent the fin and heatpipe assembly over by about 75° " you would have had the exact same thought we did! In point of fact, the similarities are a lot more than skin deep as this cooler does have four short heatpipes, a relatively small fin assembly and a “cases-less” / skeletonized fan on top of it...just like the AC CPU cooling solution.

Is this cooler a clone of the AC Freezer 7 Pro or is it a refinement of that design? Where both coolers were designed by the same man and this cooler is a more recent cooler, we are inclined to think of it as a refinement upon that design as it does have some differences from the AC cooler. We will go over those differences in a moment but for now lets start at the base of this unit and work our way up.


As previously mentioned this cooler is a heatpipe based unit; however it does not take advantage of the Heatpipe Direct Touch technology but rather it uses the more old fashioned way of heating up a solid chunk of metal which is in turn cooled by its four heatpipes.

While this is a dated design, Gelid has given it an interesting tweak: before HDTs came on the scene it was widely known that a thinner base would be more efficient at cooling the CPU than a thicker base. This is because it would transfer its heat to the heatpipes a lot quicker and easier and this is exactly what Gelid has done. The base of this unit is not only made of extremely thin material but is also solid copper (with metal stiffeners on each side for the mounting hardware). This combination should make for optimal heat transfer, which probably can’t be as efficient as a HDT solution but should still be fairly decent all the same.


The four heatpipes themselves are of the shorter, smaller variety typically found on more compact coolers. Unlike most tower designs which use large dual direction “U” shape heatpipes, these heatpipes are the shorter single direction “L” heatpipes. This style has been shown to be less effective and efficient than their larger brethren, but as this unit's number one priority is noise reduction and not heat reduction they should be more than adequate for the job.


As mentioned before, the base of this unit is solid copper with two wings of aluminum, which are not meant to transfer heat from a CPU; rather their job is to provide extra strength for the mounting brackets and the necessary width as well.

The polish of the base is certain first rate, but there are still some minor tool markings which you can feel with your fingernail. Of course, as this base is solid copper it will probably loose that pretty mirror like shine fairly fast as it tarnishes. We really must say that this base is easily above average if this was a $50 unit but the fact that this good a finish is found on a $35 CPU cooling solution is down right amazing.


Moving on to the top of the base you can see Gelid has taken the time and resources to turn it into a secondary heatsink with five rows of fins cut out of the aluminum top. This top may be aluminum and thus rust resistant but Gelid has taken the extra step and had it nickel plated. With the recycled air blowing down and over these fins this should have a positive effect on the Silent Spirit's performance. This is because those fins may be small but there is a whole bunch of them, and surface area is the name of the game when it comes to passive heatsink blocks.


In the introduction, we called this cooler a hybrid downdraft because this is probably the most apt description we can give it. Unlike a tower cooler which stands up straight (90°) or your typical downdraft cooler which lies on it side, this cooler is bent up too about a 15° angle from horizontal. This does give it most of the advantages of a tower cooler, namely increased efficiency in the heatpipes (the heat can rise up and away from the heat source and cool and condense back down) yet also has the biggest advantage afforded to your typical downdraft cooler: increase motherboard cooling. This is certainly a very elegant solution as you really are getting (on paper at least) the best of both worlds with none of the major downsides. The only real disadvantage this design has is the heatpipes themselves are supporting all the weight and taking all the stress and strain created from the vibrations of the fan.


We have left the fin and fin assembly for last since in this one area you have the best and the worst that this cooler has to offer all wrapped up nice and tidy like. The biggest issue we have with these fins is how thin and cheap their construction is. In many ways they feel more like pieces of (rather thick) aluminum foil rather than aluminum fins. This does help keep weight the a minimum but the amount of thermal energy they can absorb and pass on is rather limited. On the positive side there is approximately 44 of these fins so what they lack individually, they almost make up for in quantity.


Also on the positive side this cooler has one of the best faces we have seen in a long, long while. Heck, in many ways it is even better than the Noctua NH-U and NH-C series faces, and that is some high praise indeed!

What Gelid has done is to break the front of this face down into small groups of fins with every two out of five fins taller than the others. This taken as a whole cuts the front face up into smaller chunks and makes the most efficient use of what air movement the Silent Spirit's smallish fan affords it. To further increase the efficiency of its face, Gelid has taken a page from the water cooling section and places a fan shroud between the fan and the heatsink. It may not be a very big shroud but it certainly helps reduce dead zones and reduces static pressure. This one – two combination is certainly effective and should significantly increase the heatsinks’ efficiency. We just wish those flimsy fins were worth such an elegant and refined design.

As we said earlier, the fins and fin assembly best sum up this cooler’s design and construction. On the one hand you have some really good engineering going into the Silent Spirit's design but its actual construction leaves a lot to be desired. With most new companies we would attribute this duality to nothing more than first time “rookie mistakes” and leave it at that; however in the case of Gelid, they might be a new company but the founders of it are certainly not rookies. As the old saying goes "you only get one chance to make a good first impression" and while the impression we are forming is better than it was in the first section, it still has a lot of catching up to do if it wants to impress us.