INTRODUCTION

   Yesterday we had to turn on both air conditioners to keep the temperature in our lab at 23 degrees in order to wrap up some tests since according to our Oregon Scientific weather station temperature outside was roughly 33 degrees Celsius. Summer is (almost) over however and so i expect temperatures to drop rapidly by the end of September which is good news for us since that will allow us to do our jobs easier. Now as most of you know Intel announced their X99 mainboard chipset a few days back along with their new 59xx line of Core i7 CPUs and although we will not be reviewing either (well we may just review the mainboard model we will be using) we plan on replacing our Core i7-920 system with a brand new Core i7-5930x one which will of course become our primary test rig and move our Core i7-3930x one in second place. Until that happens however we will continue to test products with our Core i7-3930x rig and today strapped on it we have the latest Grandis XE1239 CPU Cooler by SilentiumPC.

   Established in 2007 in Warsaw, Poland SilentiumPC brand is the business division of Cooling.pl, family owned distribution company specialized in high-end cooling solutions. Since then we bring high-quality silent PC cases, power supplies and cooling solutions that simply get the job done without breaking the bank. And how we do it? Well, we share the old-school belief that good products are the key to success. No aggressive marketing, no flashy banners everywhere, no mighty slogans. Instead we’re putting our efforts in effective design and smart cost-cutting so you get no fancy boxes or stuff you don’t need, just the pure essence of functionality at unbeatable prices. Product development process is focused on user-experience, how the product will function, how you will interact with it. We start from asking the right questions to the right people and choosing the most desired features.

   The Grandis XE1236 is the first attempt by SilentiumPC to create a dual-heatsink CPU air cooler but instead of following the example of most manufacturers in the market they decided to use two relatively small heatsinks so whereas for example the latest NH-D15 by Noctua measures 165x150x135mm (H,W,L) the Grandis XE1236 measures just 158x130x105mm. According to SilentiumPC they followed this path because they wanted to allow mounting of the cooler inside small PC cases (cost should be lower as well) so if you're after high cooling efficiency i can tell you right from the get go that the Grandis XE1236 wasn't designed to meet your needs. Still it's a dual heatsink tower that comes ready with two ultra-silent hydraulic-bearing 120mm fans (you can even mount a third one at the rear if you want better performance) so we are indeed quite curious to see how it compares against similar solutions.