Arctic Cooling Silentium T2

As to the small power supply, it held up far better than I had thought it would. To stress it, I ran two instances of SuperPi, two instances of Prime95 and a loop of 3D Mark 06 for 6 hours.

I am very impressed with the performance of the power supply. Near all components were running during the 6 hours, including the power hungry dual core CPU. The largest delta was 0.05, better than anyone could expect out of a PSU that’s included with a case.

Overall, this case has it’s share of pros and cons. Sadly, I feel that the cons outweigh the pros, because I was quite frustrated by the end of installation. The case doesn’t offer incredible cooling, but it keeps everything pretty quiet, which was the primary goal.

Some of the problems I ran into, could have been prevented had their been instructions included with the case. The Arctic Cooling website is not exactly that user friendly, so it took me a while before I found out the instruction manual was available in PDF form. Of course, that doesn’t help anyone who is building their first computer who don’t have access to the internet and a printer.

In it’s favor though, the case does have good styling. It’s not amazing, but it isn’t supposed to be. The thermodynamics are well thought out, but it doesn’t really seem to give us a huge advantage at all, which could be due to our already high ambient temps (80°F).

The power supply is probably the biggest gripe of them all though. Granted, it has a peak power of 450W, but it lacks many connecters. If you have more than one S-ATA drive, you are out of luck without a power adapter. The same goes for a PCI-E card that requires a 6-Pin connecter. I truly believe they should have held back on so many Molex connecters and instead included extra S-ATA and a PCI-E connecter. A 24-Pin and 8-Pin connectors able to break off into 20-Pin and 4-Pin, respectively, would have been a huge benefit.

In the end, this is a solid case, but it seems to be strictly suited for an HTPC user with an outdated setup. If the power supply was bulkier and had more necessary connectors, the overall score would be much better. However, as it stands, I am giving the Silentium T2 a 6 out of 10.

Pros
• Good styling
• Unique thermodynamics
• Good size for an HTPC
• Small power supply, but extremely stable
• 4 excellent fans included

Cons
• Frustrating installation
• Power supply lacks PCI-E connecter
• Only way to turn off the PSU is to pull the plug
• Lack of instructions
• Have to remove front panel to install CD-Roms

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June 2 Addendum – Response from Arctic Cooling

I am sorry to hear that the Silentium T2 did not meet your expectations.

We will be coming out with a revision 2 model of our Silentiums second half of this year. The platform (plastic bottom) will be secured to the case, HDD will include a passive heatsink which will be set horizontally rather than vertically. It will be enclosed with a vibration absorption material and PSU will have one 120mm fan to exhaust air out of the case at the front.