Gelid The Black Edition CPU Cooler Review

 

For many of you out there, a huge question mark will be raised when I mention the name Gelid. Well I’ll clear that up for you now, Gelid are an enthusiast PC hardware company formed in 2008, who manufacture fans, CPU air coolers, GPU air coolers, several thermal compounds, fan controls, they even do cases. Pretty much everything you would need to cool your Gaming rig, from a company with a good degree of experience. So here we have Gelid’s latest and greatest CPU cooler The Black Edition (CC-BEdition-01-A), but what do we know about it so far?

Gelid’s The Black Edition is a dual heatsink cooler, featuring 7 power heatpipes, a unique heatsink design, PWM fan control, a multi award-winning Slim PWM 120mm fan and a Silent 120mm PWM fan.

Which all sounds good on paper. Let’s take a closer look.

 

 

 

On the front of a rather stylish box in varying tones of grey, we have an angled depiction of Gelid’s The Black Edition with an unearthly green glow surrounding it. Above this we have the model name with a brief description, the Gelid logo and rooted at the bottom the company web address.

Over on the back of the box shows us the socket compatibility (includes LGA 1150), technical drawings of the installation kits and an image of The Black Edition air flow concept.

 

 

The left side of the box gives us all of The Black Edition features and specifications. The features include:

7 Power Heatpipes
3 pcs of 8mm and 4 pcs of 6mm heatpipes for maximum heat transfer from core to aluminium fins at extreme condition.

Unique Heatsink Design
For lower air flow resistance, to achieve efficient air channels & for attaching up to 3 fans.

Multi Award-Winning Slim PWM & Silent PWM
One slim and one standard sized 120mm silent fan with high airflow.

PWM Fan Control
Silent operation at low CPU temperature and fan speed acceleration when CPU temperature becomes higher.

 

Whilst on the right we have some rather nice photographs of The Black Edition hidden inside and some pictograms showing the CPU coolers key features.

 

 

Unboxing The Black Edition shows the cooler has the two 120mm fans pre-installed and the heatsink itself is well protected within three foam blocks. All of the fittings and installation guides are packaged separately in a small white box.

 

 

Box Contents

• Gelid The Black Edition CPU Cooler
• 1x 120mm Silent 12 PWM fan
• 1x 120mm Slim 12 PWM fan
• Fittings Kit
• Fan Y-Splitter Cable
• GC-Extreme Thermal Compound
• Installation Guide

At the time of writing, Gelid’s The Black Edition is available from Amazon for £54.35 and offers a fantastic 5 year warranty.

 

Specifications/Features

courtesy of Gelid

 

The Black Edition (CC-BEdition-01-A)

 

‘Applications:

Intel™ Socket 775, 1155, 1156, 1366, 2011 & 1150:
CPU: All Pentium D/ Pentium 4/ All Celeron D/ All Pentium Dual-Core/ Extreme/ All Core 2 Extreme/ Core 2 Quad/ Core 2 Duo, Core i5, Core i7

AMD™ Socket AM2/ AM2+/ AM3/ AM3+/ FM1/ FM2:
CPU: All Athlon 64 X2, Athlon 64, All Athlon II, All Sempron, Phenom, Phenom II, All A Series AMD APU Llano

All brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.‘

‘Design Concept:

Traditional heat pipe arrangement of high-end heatsink heatpipes are usually soldered on one row. Therefore the heat absorption capacity of the outer heatpipe will be negatively affected when there are more than 5 heatpipes.

To solve this problem a special array of heatpipes was used on “The Black Edition” to take full advantage of all 7 6mm heatpipe heat transfer capacity. On “The Black Edition” two heatpipes were soldered on top of three middle heatpipes.‘

‘Slim 12 PWM & Silent 12 PWM:

The Slim 12 PWM (120 x120 x 15.8mm) features a unique Hydro Dynamic Bearing. This bearing ensures silent operation and ensures long lifetime. The optimized fan blades generate high air flow.

Designed for advanced users GELID Solutions Silent 12 PWM fan provides additional airflow by using Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) to automatically adjust fan speed according to the CPU load. The fan can be idled down and thus be much quieter. An intelligent IC had been integrated into the fan’s PCB to exploit your mainboard’s BIOS software. This technology is more efficient and convenient than using an external fan controller to adjust the voltage.

Up to total 3 fans can be mounted on the heatsink of the “The Black Edition”.’

 

 

* Additional details available here

 

First Impressions

 

Opening up the box and having a closer look at The Black Edition took me by surprise. Measuring 109mm(L) x 126mm(W) x 160mm(H) and weighing just 990g (both including fans) it is without a doubt the smallest and lightest dual stack CPU Cooler I’ve ever laid my hands on. Not only that but it’s one of the finest looking air coolers I’ve ever seen too!

 

 

Taking a look at the front of The Black Edition, we can clearly see all seven 6mm heatpipes. Rather than a standard flat array where all the heatpipes are lined up and soldered in a straight line, Gelid have stacked two on top of the other three in a trapezoid fashion (much like a stack of logs). This should in theory help heat absorption throughout all seven pipes and enable better heat transfer capacity.

Looking at the above right image, shows that Gelid have chosen to close the sides of The Black Edition fin stacks. This isn’t just to make it look good (although it certainly does), but the unique design is there to help reduce air flow resistance by creating air channels for the fans to pull air through.

 

 

Up top where we’d normally see bare aluminium, Gelid have chosen something a little different. Instead capping the stacks with two very good looking black brushed aluminium plates with some mesh styling. To the centre of the two stacks we also have two Gelid stickers to offer a little contrast. The overall aesthetics are great and as far as air coolers go, The Black Edition looks damn fine!

To the bottom of the stack we see the heatpipes joined above a large copper block. Rather unusually you can clearly see the milling lines and the block isn’t highly polished like on most CPU coolers I’ve seen recently. Looking to the left we can see the heatpipes have a shorter distance to the block, which should mean The Black Edition will be compatible with a wide variety of memory (RAM).

 

 

With the fans attached by their spring clips, you can see the huge difference in depth of the two fans. Both are 120mm, but the Silent 12 PWM is a familiar 25mm thick, where as the Slim 12 PWM is only 15.8mm. This will help aide compatibility with a multitude of memory (RAM). Personally I think it’s one of the best looking air coolers I’ve seen, but one thing that certainly lets it down is the cables. Neither the fans, nor the y-splitter are braided (I’m a sucker for little things like this), they are entirely sleeved in black plastic though so it’s not all bad.

So far I admit I’m impressed with the overall look of Gelid’s Black Edition. It is a solid, well designed, looks great and very small for a dual stack CPU cooler, but does it have the performance to match?

 

Hardware Installation

 

Test Rig Setup

Case	Cooler Master HAF XB	Power Supply	Corsair AX760i
Motherboard	MSI Z87 G45 GAMING	CPU	Intel Core i5-4670K
CPU Cooler	Gelid The Black Edition	RAM	HyperX Savage 2400MHz 8GB Kit
Graphics Card	MSI R9 290 GAMING 4G	SSD	HyperX Fury 120GB

 

 

The installation of Gelid’s The Black Edition was fairly simple to begin with. The first task according to the instructions, was to stick small insulation spacers over the motherboard mounts (both to insulate and help protect the PCB). As these washers may interfere with future testing, I chose to stick them to the screw on standoffs instead. Now the fiddly bit’s done, it’s straight onto the mounting assembly. The Black Edition backplate doesn’t feature mounting holes or fixed pins like on many other CPU cooler backplates. Instead it features a row of teeth which help to keep the pin screws in place allowing you to guide them through the motherboard mounts without too much fuss. The standoffs are then screwed securely over each upright (washer side down), the Intel mounting plates put in place and fixed to the standoff assemblies with the included nuts. A pea sized amount of thermal paste is then squeezed onto the centre of the i5-4670K, then on goes the heatsink. Even though The Black Edition is a dual heatsink cooler, it is surprisingly small which means in order to fix the tower to the mounting assembly, the central Silent 12 PWM fan must be removed. The sprung screws are placed in either side of the CPU cooler, which is then held in place, each screw tightened in turn to help an even load, then the central fan is replaced. Which leaves the simple task of plugging both PWM fans into the PWM y-splitter cable, which is in turn plugged into the CPU1 header on the MSI Z87-G45 GAMING test motherboard. All nice and simple…

Except for two things… I’m not someone who is gifted with the deftest of touches (James will probably agree I’ve a habit of breaking things (ED: Agreed!)) leaving me with two small issues. The sprung loaded screws that are used to fix The Black Edition heatsink to the mounting assembly are both top heavy and don’t feature a magnetic head. This caused them to constantly fall out of position, leaving me to hold them in place with pliers. The second problem for me were the fan spring clips, which are always fiddly, if I’m honest I’m not a huge fan of them anyway.

Now Gelid’s The Black Edition is installed (despite a couple of niggles) and I think you’d agree, looks great. Yet appearances can be deceptive, so let’s get some benchmarks run!

 

Testing Methodology/Setup

 

For CPU Cooler testing, we here at pcGameware run Prime95 for a 15 minute period. During this period the temperature is monitored with CoreTemp and the cooling performance recorded (the max recorded is the average for all cores). Between each stress test we allow a 15 minute cool-down to allow for more accurate results. To help with fan speed accuracy we use SpeedFan whilst using MSI Command Center to adjust the fan speed. A close eye is also kept on the ambient temperature, with the maximum being recorded for each run, this allows us to calculate the Delta temperature (Core – Ambient = Delta). Each run was performed with the Intel Core i5-4670K CPU at the following frequencies: 3.4GHz (Stock), 4.0GHz (using MSI OC Genie, shown in the picture below) and 4.5GHz (using Intel XTU(Extreme Tuning Utility), also shown in the pictures below), all results have been recorded with CPU-Z.

* Please note: To ascertain the maximum and minimum noise levels produced by our CPU test coolers. The dB is recorded from 1m away from the cooler itself and with all case fans unplugged to isolate the sound in question.

 

 

Hardware Performance

 

To make our performance tests easier to follow and to get the most accurate recordings, all of the following tests have been carried out with case fans set at 100% and both Gelid PWM fans also set at 100%.

 

• Intel Core i5-4670K – 3.4GHz (stock)

 

 

CPU Cooler	Fan Speed	Ambient Temperature	Max CPU Temperature (core average)	Delta Temperature	Noise Level
Thermalright Archon IB-E X2	100%	25.00	44.75	20.00	35db
Cryorig R1 Ultimate	100%	25.00	45.00	20.00	38db
Gelid The Black Edition	100%	24.00	46.50	22.50	34db
Akasa Medusa Venom	100%	24.00	46.50	22.50	40db
EKWB EK-Kit 240L	100%	23.00	46.00	23.00	52db
Thermaltake Frio Extreme Silent 14 Dual	100%	26.00	49.00	23.00	33db
Scythe Tatsumi	100%	24.50	49.75	25.25	32db
Cooler Master Nepton 280L	100%	20.50	54.75	34.25	67db
Raijintek Themis	100%	19.00	60.75	41.75	47db

 

So on goes the pcG Test Rig and all fans set to 100%. Gelid weren’t kidding when they marketed the cooler as silent, on full flow the cooler produces just 34dB of noise. It also performs very well and takes third spot on the chart with just 46.50C (22.50C Delta).

We best take a look at how it performs with a little Overclock!

 

• Intel Core i5-4670K – 4.0GHz (OC Genie)

 

 

CPU Cooler	Fan Speed	Ambient Temperature	Max CPU Temperature (core average)	Delta Temperature	Noise Level
EKWB EK-Kit L240	100%	23.50	60.00	36.50	52db
Thermalright Archon IB-E X2	100%	25.50	63.50	38.00	35db
Cryorig R1 Ultimate	100%	25.50	64.50	39.00	38db
Cooler Master Nepton 280L	100%	18.00	59.00	41.00	67db
Akasa Medusa Venom	100%	24.50	66.25	41.75	40db
Gelid The Black Edition	100%	25.00	66.75	41.75	34db
Thermaltake Frio Extreme Silent 14 Dual	100%	25.50	67.75	42.25	33db
Raijintek Themis	100%	19.50	68.00	48.50	47db
Scythe Tatsumi	100%	24.00	72.75	48.75	32db

 

With the MSI OC Genie turned on, the i5-4670K is given a small performance boosting overclock and set at 4.0GHz, Gelid’s The Black Edition still does a sterling job. With the CPU reaching 66.75C (41.75C Delta), the CPU is still well within the desired temperature range. It is worth noting, that Gelid’s cooler is very small for a dual tower cooler and is in fact dwarfed by the Akasa Medusa Venom, yet offers very similar performance.

Can it cope with a slightly higher overclock?

 

• Intel Core i5-4670K – 4.5GHz (manual overclock via Intel XTU)

 

 

CPU Cooler	Fan Speed	Ambient Temperature	Max CPU Temperature (core average)	Delta Temperature	Noise Level
Cryorig R1 Ultimate	100%	24.50	65.75	41.25	38db
EKWB EK-Kit L240	100%	24.00	66.50	42.50	52db
Thermalright Archon IB-E X2	100%	25.00	68.00	43.00	35db
Thermaltake Frio Extreme Silent 14 Dual	100%	26.00	72.50	46.50	33db
Akasa Medusa Venom	100%	24.00	70.75	46.75	40db
Gelid The Black Edition	100%	24.50	72.50	48.00	34db
Cooler Master Nepton 280L	100%	18.00	69.25	51.25	67db
Scythe Tatsumi	100%	24.50	77.25	52.75	32db
Raijintek Themis	100%	20.00	75.00	55.00	47db

 

With a manual overclock and pushed up to the giddy heights of 4.5GHz, the i5-4670K starts to get pretty warm. This is where all of our test CPU Coolers show what they can really do. Gelid’s The Black Edition keeps the CPU easily in check with an average core temperature of 72.50C (48.00C Delta). This certainly isn’t bad, despite many of our previous coolers giving better performance, they don’t all offer the same level of silence and are all a damn sight bigger.

Of course if this is still a little toasty for you it’s worth bearing in mind that while Prime95 is an excellent tool for testing the stability of any CPU overclock, it does this by running your CPU at 100%, in your average Gaming session you’ll most likely not even use half that. 😉

 

Final Thoughts

 

Without a doubt the smallest dual heatsink cooler I’ve ever seen is right here in my Test Rig. In fact at just 109(L) x 126(W) x 160(H) including both 120mm PWM fans, Gelid’s The Black Edition is the smallest CPU cooler I’ve tested in a long time.

The Black Edition CPU cooler arrived at pcGameware in a rather stylish box in varying tones of grey with bright green highlights surrounding the model name and the cooler itself. The box was concise and offered all of the information required. The contents were very well packaged with all the fittings boxed separately, while The Black Edition was protected between three foam blocks.

As previously mentioned, The Black Edition is very small by comparison to other twin tower coolers (certainly those we’ve tested here at pcG) and not too hefty with a weight of just 990g. The cooler itself has a very high build quality and good design, but what impressed me most was its looks (yep, I’m that shallow 😉 ). Rather than leaving the heatsink caps bare aluminium, Gelid have seen fit to use a black piece of brushed aluminium over both towers, painting the heatpipe ends black and placing small but contrasting Gelid logos atop. Matched with the all black fans and cables (although sadly not braided), The Black Edition is certainly a CPU Cooler with a sense of style.

Fitting The Black Edition was a pretty simple task with the only issues for me being the sprung screws (non-magnetic screws are major pain to fit) and fan clips (ok, so this ones purely because I have sausage fingers). Given the heatpipe layout, the ability to adjust fan height and the incredibly thin 120mm Slim 12 PWM (15.8mm) front fan, gives Gelid’s The Black Edition a vast compatibility range with all bar the largest of Memory (RAM) modules.

One area of surprise for me was The Black Edition’s cooling performance. The CPU Cooler offers great cooling with the i5-4670K at 3.4GHz (stock) keeping a maximum average core temperature of 46.50C (22.50C Delta), which leaves it sitting in third place in our chart. Giving the CPU a little boost with an overclock of 4.0GHz and The Black Edition still does a pretty good job with a maximum average core temperature of 66.75C (41.75C Delta), offering a very similar performance to coolers nearly twice its size. Where its performance does tail off a little, is in the 4.5GHz test, but with an average maximum core temperature of 72.50C (48.00C Delta) it is still very respectable in my eyes.

Perhaps one of The Black Edition’s standout features is the noise it produces. At full flow and both 120mm PWM fans set at 100%, the maximum noise produced was just 34dB. Of course for general non CPU intensive web browsing and day to day work, you could even reduce the fans to their lowest speed leaving you a silent CPU cooler with just 28dB produced! 🙂

All in I must admit I’m very impressed by Gelid’s The Black Edition. It’s small, well built, almost silent and looks great, then it even goes on to match the performance of some CPU air coolers of a much larger size. Personally I’d be more than happy to have one of these in my own Gaming Rig and I feel an approximate price of £55.00 is certainly fair.

 

Verdict

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Many thanks to Gelid for providing this sample for review