Quiet fanless CPU cooler - Silverstone Heligon HE02

The fanless CPU cooler!

The fanless SPU coolers are something very interesting. They need to pull away the heat from the CPU and to dissipate it in the surrounding air and all this without a fan that blow the heat away!
To achieve this goal the fanless CPU coolers need few things:

1st Huge surface that dissipate the heat.

Few things determinate the heat transfer, the surface, the bigger is better, the airflow, higher speed airflow is better, and the temperature difference between the heated object and the air.

So the huge surface is must have in a fanless design because there is missing the artificial airflow from the fan. as you can see on the picture:

Silverstone Heligon HE02 CPU cooler

As you can see there are a lot of fins increasing the surface - helping the heat transfer.
There are also 6 heat pipes that transfer the heat from the cpu to every single fin, even the last one.

2nd Big size of the CPU cooling tower

Because there is no fan attached, the big size of the cooler helps to take the heat far away from the CPU where it can be spread without heating the CPU back or keeping the cooler at higher temperature.
Here are the sizes of the cooler:

Silverstone Heligon HE02 dimensions

3rd A little bit surprisingly but.... Airflow!

Surprisingly but the heat sink still needs and airflow to spread the heat in the air. But here is the tricky part.
The Heligon HE02 is counting on natural convection of the air to take the heat away. And the natural convection is not very powerful. In order to ensure enough airflow - the heat sink is made with large space between the fins compared to the CPU coolers with fan. In this way its easier for the air to move through the fins.
Of course this mean that on same size you can put less number of fins that's why the Silverstone decided to make the fins with bigger surface. As you can see on the picture above with the dimensions the cooler is wider that its taller with 170 x 130 mm wide and 160 mm - tall this is pretty much one big cubic chunk of copper and aluminium!

Specifications of Heligion HE02

Dimension: 170mm(W) x 130mm(D) x 160mm (H)

CPU TDP: Fanless 95W (varies depending on chassis airflow)
                  Fanless with 120mm fan in case > 900rpm - 150W
                  1 x 120mm fan – over 150W

Sockets:     Intel Socket LGA775/1150/1155/1156/1366/2011
                  AMD Socket AM2/AM3/FM1/FM2

As you can see even fanless it can cool up to 95W TDP CPUs - these are Anything bellow Intel i5 and for AMD below FX-6300 or FX-4300
If there is one 120mm fan in the PC case. The TDP jumps to 150W. This mean that if there is one 120mm fan located near the cooler that helps the airflow you can cool i7 or FX-8xxx.
If you attach one fan to the heat sink itself you can use this cooler to overclock CPUs with power over 150W!