Acoustic Samples: Listen to this Heatsink!

With two fans spinning at around 4500RPM the Sibak AT01515B is noisier than you might initially expect for a heatsink with 50mm fans. The key here is fans, with two motors there is bound to be an increase in noise levels.

To hear for yourself what this heatsink actually sounds like, just click on the headphones and listen to the MP3 recording.

FrostyTech Acoustic Sampling Chamber
Standard Waveform view of a 10 second recording. Click on the headphones to listen to an MP3 recording of this heatsink in operation.

Sound Level Measurements:

Listening to the actual noise a heatsink makes allows you to hear what pure numbers alone cannot get across. To further emphasize FrostyTech's reliance on cold hard facts when evaluating a heatsink, we also take Decibel readings with a sound level meter. The list of heatsinks which have had their noise level measured continues to grow as more are tested.

FrostyTech Sound Level Results
-	Manufacturer	Model	Noise Level	Scale
	Zalman	All Flower HSF	47.4/28.9 dB	quiet
	Noisecontrol	Silverado	50.8 dB
	Thermal Integration	Ti-V77L	53.0 dB
	Tocools	Crown	54.5 dB
	Sibak	AT01515B	55.8 dB
	Dynatron	DC1206BMP	65.1 dB	louder

The Sibak cooler comes in pretty much in the middle of the road, but on the noisier side. While one or two degrees in temperature mean a lot, the human ear has a hard time distinguishing between sounds with less than 3 dB difference. Keep that in mind when you look at the above sound level measurements. The 38mm Delta fan on the Dynatron heatsink is substantially louder than everything else.

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

Ouch! Believe it or not there is one good number for the Sibak AT01515B and that is 60.1 degrees on the 100Watt test with the large interface die. Every other test is really pretty poor, or just not worth the bother.

The Sibak is really limited in terms of what processors you can realistically use with it, and given the somewhat noisy characteristics you might be well advised to just pass it up and try something with a little more kick.