14 DAY TRIAL // Active cooling devices have been around for quite a long time. Because the power hungry CPUs and GPUs need to be cooled down somehow, you'll most likely end up with at least a bunch of coolers inside your PC. Air cooling is the least expensive method but also the least efficient. For example, when you come across a CPU that exceeds 130-135W TDP even the best heatpipe and TEC coolers are running on edge. When you find yourself in such a position, you have only 2 choices: You could use a watercooling system and sacrifice all the space inside your case or you'll end up on air but with a moderate overclock. Well, it seems that Evercool thought it could do both with a single cooling unit.
Evercool's Silver Knight is the first heat sink and water cooler combo for the CPU (from what I know). The device is really light although it comes with four heat pipes and a copper base plate. The combo could function as a standard heatsink in case the water cooling loop doesn't work with the heatpipes and fins being ventilated by a large side fan which pushes the air towards the outflow case fan. Water cooling pipes circulate the fluid from and to the heat pipes, producing a 'self-contained water cooling' effect as Evercool likes to call it.
On the performance side, an old NetBurst Pentium 965 overclocked at over 4GHz was kept quiet at a load temperature of 54 Celsius degrees which may be a lot but is certainly a lower number than the temperatures achieved while using a Zalman 9700 or a Thermaltake Big Typhoon which kept the CPU running at 57-59 degrees.
Overall, the cooler is certainly more efficient than an air cooling unit, but I would have liked it even more if it were easier to install. Especially since many motherboards have placed large capacitors around the CPU socket and that makes the installation of the I/O Shield pretty uncomfortable.