The recent weather in the UK has been abnormally hot, so hot that the ambient temperature of my room has gone above Intel’s designed temperature. This leads to random and spontaneous shutdowns, which aren’t much good for the PC or whatever game I happen to be playing at the time so I decided to upgrade the cooler to something a bit more substantial. This is harder than normal as the maximum clearance offered by my RVZ-02 is a pitiful 58mm, so most normal coolers won’t work. Luckily, Silverstone make the AR06 which fits in exactly the space available so I bought it from Amazon for £35.

The colours on the fan are a strange beige housing and blue fan blades, and it’s a 92mm fan. Installation is (mostly) straight forward, with two ‘wings’ that attach to the main heatsink that are in turn secured to the motherboard with 4 bolts with screw heads on them. The size difference is noticeable, with a much higher fin density in the AR06. Top down comparison of the AR06 and Intel stock heatsink

Side-on comparison

Original Intel heatsink A dusty Intel stock heatsink in a cramped case

Silverstone AR06 The new CPU cooler installed

Reverse of the motherboard

The heatsink is held on with 4 individual bolts through the board, and no backplate

Overall, temperatures under load are now closer to 60-65C, with all cores running at the maximum turbo of 3.1GHz (the Intel heatsink made the CPU only run that fast for about 4 seconds before going to a turbo of 2.9GHz, base frequency is 2.7GHz). This testing is not scientific in any way, but the computer is not capable of running prime95 for more than 5 minutes before crashing and I’ve had no random shutdowns since, so I’d call it a win!