INTRODUCTION

   The market currently is filled with two types of CPU cooling solutions, the extremely old and popular CPU Air Coolers of all types aimed toward the masses and the somewhat more advanced and expensive AIO and custom Liquid CPU Coolers aimed primarily towards professionals, enthusiasts and overclockers (custom water cooler kits however are still considered niche mainly because of their price and installation). Through the years many air and liquid coolers have reached our test bench and if we've learned something is that nowadays air coolers don't seem to be advancing as much as liquid ones. Luckily there are some CPU Air Coolers out there capable of going head to head with many AIO Liquid Coolers and so since there's no real headroom for serious improvement the next best thing is for manufacturers to improve on what they already have. Thermalright has been polishing the Silver Arrow model for quite some time now and according to them the brand new Silver Arrow IB-E model which we have here today is a clear improvement over the previous SB-E model.

   Thermalright is an elite design house that manufactures cooling products for computer components for the best quality and performance your money can buy. In 2002, AMD released its first generation Thunderbird CPU and since then we have been there every step of the way to counter high voltage and high heat with innovative design and highly acclaimed cooling solutions not only for AMD but for Intel as well. One of early well known solutions was the SK-6. With many positive and rave reviews under its belt Thermalright bolted to the top as the heat sink manufacturer mostly preferred by Overclockers and enthusiasts around the World. To this day, innovation never left our vocabulary as we keep coming up with leading edge designs staying ahead of the competition.

   The very first Silver Arrow model was released roughly 4 years ago and was able to keep up (and in some cases surpass) the award winning NH-D14 by Noctua. With the introduction of the LGA 2011 socket Thermalright released the Silver Arrow SB-E to combat the newly released NH-D14 SE2011 by Noctua with identical results. To clearly win the performance crown Thermalright then released the Silver Arrow SB-E Extreme edition which is indeed the best CPU Air Cooler we have tested to date with sole drawback the very high noise levels emanating from its two high-RPM fans. The Silver Arrow IB-E and IB-E Extreme models are the two latest additions in the Silver Arrow line featuring a different heatsink design to improve on slight clearance issues with the PCIex socket encountered with the previous SB-E models. Fortunately the size is roughly the same and although this time over the IB-E model comes outfitted with two TY-141 fans (instead of one TY-141 and one TY-150) thanks to the new design it should be able to go up against the SB-E model.