Introduction
Many of you might have noticed the rather thin heatsink placed on the CPU and chipset of your MSI Wind. Because this cannot be the best way to cool your laptop Aua Computer, a Germany based company specialized in computer cooling, introduced the 'Windstille' heatsink. The heatsink is custom made just for the MSI Wind notebook and should be a more effective way of cooling the components and thus making the fan operate at lower speeds. In this review I will take a look at those promises.
The package
The package is small and contains the Windstille and a short installation guide. The installation guide is in English and German. The Windstille comes without thermalpaste so you have to use your own favorite one.
The heatsink
Here you can see the size of the heatsink. It's not much bigger than the stock heatsink but it is a lot thicker as you can see later on. The Windstille however weights only 20 grams so you won't realy notice any difference in this. Also, the Windstille covers the southbridge, which the stock heatsink doesn't cool.
Front
Back (sorry for the crappy quality)
Installation
Installation of the heatsink is like a stroll through the park. Just remove the stock heatsink and clean the components. Apply your favorite (non electrically conductive) thermalpaste and stick on the Windstille. You only have to fasten one screw as shown in the instructions and you're ready to go!
Here you can see the thickness of the Windstille. Much thicker than the 'alu foil' stock heatsink
Results
Used hardware:
Medion Akoya E1210 (yes, the MSI Wind Clone)
Windstille heatsink
Zalman ZM-STG1 Thermal Grease
The laptop was stressed with Orthos for 30 minutes for the stressed temperature. After this the laptop was idle for 10 minutes for the idle temperature.
As you can see the difference in stressed temperature is significant (50 against 43). In idle the difference is much smaller (27 against 25). This might not look as a huge difference but it is actually. I presume people would buy this heatsink to slow down the fan and this works really well. Where the fan would usually spin up as soon as I started surfing the internet or use the Wind in another low-level way, the Windstille keeps the fan at no/low speed a lot longer. Only when I use a program that stresses the CPU more the fan starts to spin up. I'm not sure where the threshold for the fan to start up is, but I guess it's at 30 degrees, which seems just high enough for the Windstille to stay under.
Conclusion
Aqua Computer has delivered a solid product. It fits perfectly on the components that need decent cooling (including the southbridge). The Windstille is the heatsink that should have been on the Wind out of-the-box. As we have seen the heatsink cools the components much better than the stock heatsink ( especially under load). It makes sure the fan spins up a lot later or (when you you don't stress the CPU too much like when using Word/Firefox) not at all. The heatsink is not cheap. It comes at €19,90 and of course you need your own thermal paste. For those people that like a quiet laptop this should not be a big problem.
pros
-good performance
-less fan noise
-easy to install
-lightweight
cons
-price
-no thermal grease
Thanks to Aqua Computer for providing the review sample
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Originally Posted by Klarko
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