Gelid launches kinda-unique Wing fans

Theo Valich — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:00:53 +0000

GELID is recently founded company by two friends of mine, Gebhard and VC Tran (nope, his first name is not Venture Capital ;-). The goal of the company is to build business based on combining the Swiss expertise with Far Eastern manufacturing capabilities, much in the same way as their previous company, Arctic Cooling or Noctua (with role of the Swiss replaced by Austria).
Mountains and cooling, these two probably go hand in hand. Anyways, I just received a press release stating that the company launched its Wing UV Blue series. Wing will probably come to market in green and red too, but for now, the company is launching UV Blue line-up.

Fans come with rubber mountings and a RPM controller

The line-up is consisted out of 80, 92 and 120mm fans, but what makes this product unique is the fact that the fans come with Nanoflux bearings. This type of bearings brings an interesting innovation – you can remove the blades to clean the dust, and also clean even the most hidden part of the fan casing itself.
Long story short, Nanoflux is nothing else but hermetically sealed bearing, meaning it is dust-proof and water-proof. In other words, it should not start squealing. Ever. In my humble opinion, if there is one annoying thing in whole computing experience – squealing fan or a card takes pole position. In the past five years, I’ve spent at least $200 and trashed fans from Zalman, Noiseblocker, Cooler Master and so on and so on. All because of squealing. Well, I’ll give this one a go.
Personally, I am a cleaning freak when it comes to PCs. Every three months, I take the whole rig apart and clean even the most hidden part of the computer – dust and I don’t go hand in hand. We’ll see can Gelid rise up to the task and produce a fan that will stay silent at least through its warranty (5 years).

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Arctic Silver 5 goes whoopsie or “No silver paste for me”

Theo Valich — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 11:00:04 +0000

Recently, my friend decided to upgrade his system from AMD Athlon 5000+ Black Edition and GigaByte 7-Series motherboard to Core 2 Duo E8500, hopefully to run at 3.8 GHz (FSB1600). 5000+ worked hard for almost a year at 3GHz, a nice speed bump from default clocks.
Back in July, he replaced previous cooler with OCZ Vendetta, and bought Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste (high density one) for better heat transfer. Fast forward to November, and the time for upgrade has come.
Ivan decided to keep his OCZ Vendetta cooler, and we removed the motherboard from the case. This was followed by CPU cooler removal, but what we saw next was nothing short of surprising. The paste suffered from separation between silver particles and the carrier material, with the paste spread all around the cooler and the CPU, not looking nicely.

Not looking good...

..not good at all. Vendetta's unique design saw paste carrier spreading all around - cleaning was close to impossible. But using Arctic Cleaner helped a great deal :-)

I’ve been using thermal paste since 1995 and my first overclocking: Intel Pentium 100 to 125 MHz (1.5×83) – but I have never seen such a separation between metal particles and the carrier. Bear in mind that I removed at least 500 coolers in the past 8 years (couple of 50+ motherboard tests will do that for ya ), but I never saw such separation, even with crappiest pastes around.
Cleaning the Vendetta proved to be close to “mission impossible”, since the liquid carrier penetrated all the tiny spaces between the heat-pipes and cooler’s body. We think that this “separation” was a byproduct of Vendetta’s open design, and potential exposure to air across the surface of the CPU.
Followed this disappointment in Arctic Silver, Ivan canned the paste (after just this application) and opted for Gelid GC-1 and didn’t look back.
Now, E8500 is happily ticking away, feeding the 9800GX2 in Folding@Home and doing a lot of video transcode using Badaboom software.

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Gelid launches kinda-unique Wing fans

Arctic Silver 5 goes whoopsie or “No silver paste for me”