Silverstone Tundra TD02-LITE

A truly budget friendly AIO (all in one) 240mm closed loop liquid cooler from Silverstone


What Silverstone says...

This feature rich model is an excellent performer for the price and a great entry point for users looking to upgrade their system to liquid cooling.

PS: Tundra = cold place ie. low temperatures

Packaging

Brown non-glossy cardboard - recyclable as well as lowered overheads

Unboxing

Fans

2 x 0.30A PWN Silverstone 120mm fans rated for 92.5CFM@18~35 dBA, 1500~2500RPM

White Box Accessories 

Improved mounting mechanism with a nice versatile rigid backplate - much better over the flimsy excuses of earlier AIO designs... no more free spinning anchor screws!

Main Unit

Squarish combo CPU block and the slim 240mm radiator, both decked in flat black

Smooth copper contact plate finish - do remove protective plastic and apply just adequate TIM from the bundled syringe before mounting

Pretty cool yet unobtrusive ice blue LED effect during operation

Radiator fin density

Test Setup

AMD APU A10-7870K (features soldered IHS so no heat transfer bottleneck, nice!)
Radeon R7 series iGPU driving a Dell U2713HM monitor at 2560 x 1440 resolution
Asrock FM2A88X Extreme6+ - latest 4.20 UEFI BIOS
Team DDR3-1600 - 2 x 2 GB sticks in dual channel
Stock AMD 125W heatpipe aircooler vs Silverstone Tundra TD02-LITE
Windows 7 x64 fresh installation
hwinfo64 v5.24 real time sensor monitoring - scrutinise mainly the mobo CPU temp sensor*

Open air mobox run ie. caseless

Ambient temps 33C as reported by SPH ST website - yes, yet another scorcher of a Temasek afternoon


*  idle onchip APU temp readings are notoriously uncalibrated by AMD and are thus meaningless, I even enabled negative temp reading (usage mean for LN2 gas heads) in hwinfo64 only to see how ridiculously far it can drop in idle... lol

The A10-7870K was...

• Initially run at stock clocks on stock aircooler and was actually mildy undervolted 0.05V as the aircooler was running hot and noisy (nearly 5K rpm, BIOS fan normal setting) under the current hot dry weather spell. Overclocking is definitely not a feasible consideration consequently...
• Next, it was run at the same stock clocks undervolted settings on the Silverstone Tundra TD02-LITE (BIOS fan normal setting)
• Finally, overclocked/upvolted APU to 4.5GHz CPU core, 975MHz GPU core and 2GHz Northbridge on the Silverstone Tundra TD02-LITE (BIOS fan normal setting)

And results are as follows...

CPU-Z

First, an introduction to the layout of hwinfo64, the characteristics of the A10-7870K APU - Asrock FM2A88X Extreme6+ combo and the connection arrangement. The Tundra pump is connected to the mobo Pwr fan header at full ~2700 rpm while the Tundra fans are connected to the mobo 4 pin CPU header for PWM control.

  

* Note that the CPU fan sensors detection apparently seems to come and go on PWM mode even within the BIOS and hwinfo64 cos they possibly spin down just too low sometimes?

AIDA64

 
Stability Test Run
- all were run for and stopped at the same 5 min mark for mobo CPU temps sensor comparison


Stock

Stock on SS Tundra
- a significant drop of 12C load temps from 54C to just 42C for the CPU core and much quieter too!

Overclocked/upvolted on SS Tundra
 - back to 54C load yet do remember it is now running both faster and quieter cos the Tundra fans max at ~1900 rpm only, totally no where near the 5K rpm whiny AMD 70mm fan

 

 

 

GPGPU Benchmark

Stock

Overclocked/upvolted on SS Tundra
- again faster yet cooler and quieter

Cinebench R15 Benchmark

- only done when overclocked/upvolted on SS Tundra

Daily Usage Temps

Surfing, streaming, downloading and gaming (on iGPU) for just over 4 hours of monitoring shows very acceptable temperatures all round

Initial Impressions

Oh wow, this is seemingly the current lowest cost 240mm AIO cooler in town, well priced at sub-S$100, even lower than its China competitor. Check it here...

Its cooling effectiveness can be seen in the significant 12C drop over the stock AMD air cooler at the same settings. The bundled PWM fans allow one to adjust the fan speed and noise as dictated according to need.

As such, it should be attractive to 

• non-hardcore overclockers wanting no fuss out of the box liquid cooling
• peace lovers who treasure a tranquil silent yet cool running rig
• aesthetic seekers after clean uncluttered looks
• users of boutique RAM with tall heat spreaders
• compact rig owners wanting a slim 240mm AIO liquid cooler (else check out the 120mm TD03-SLIM)

 
Design wise, the improved mounting mechanism with its rigid backplate is very much welcome for better clamping pressure as well as for less wear and tear from repeated mountings.

The initial setup does involve time spent discerning between the various Intel and AMD brackets and screws but the guide is both clear and concise so everything simply went OK at the very 1st try over here.

Overall, a well priced and effective renewed effort from Silverstone!

Bonus screenshots 
... a week after, testing A10-7870K benchmarks at ~ 4.7GHz CPU, 1GHz iGPU by bus clocking at 101.9MHz, loads temps are now lower probably cos of the cooler midnight ambient conditions and the TIM settling. 

Would normally use the simpler & safer multiplier only overclocking but the 1040MHz BIOS divider for the iGPU seemed to stutter in video when doing Cinebench. Just take more care when pushing APU bus overclocks cos it is intricately tied to lots of other parameters like SATA/RAM/NB etc. 

 

Bonus screenshot for AMD APU fans
... as expected, the A10-7870K runs the new LibreELEC (Kodi 16.1) nicely, like its other APU predecessors!