I don't know if the Silencer is better than the Iceberg it could be but, its NOT copper, the Iceberg4 is ALL copper and its quite heavy for its size. Also, when I bought the Iceberg4 the silencer3 wasn't available yet. So the Iceberg4 was the best available aftermarket heatsink besides modding a CPU heatsink.
Also don't expect to get any higher clocks with a the ram on a 9500 its generally slower than the ram on a 9700 mine had 3.0ns infineon and would artifact and crash over 300 without the voltmods.(300 is basically the limit for most 9500s) The 9700 pro has 2.8ns ram. There are rare cases of 9500s with 2.8ns ram though. I have seen much crappier ram on them too, a friend of mine has one with 3.3ns infineon. At stock speed its pretty much maxed.
Volt Modding is always risky, there are many things that can go wrong. You can accidentally overvolt, thats kinda hard to do if your smart about it. But what can really go wrong is if the solder gets out of hand, a tiny blob of solder can land somewhere on the board and you might not even notice it and a short circiut could fry the whole thing. A yank on a wire connected to one of the legs of a chip could rip the leg right off the board and thats pretty impossible to fix. I've even seen a guy tear a trace off the board. You could accidentally cross some connections and have a VERY hard time uncrossing them. Bottom line is you really need to know what your doing. If you don't know what a Multimeter is then I suggest you do not even think of voltmodding.
I had 2 9500s modded to 9700 with both Vmoded. I took one to a friends house to show him what it could do one day. So I get to his house and plug my card into his system (he had a modded 9500 as well but had the crappy 3.3ns ram so I would not need to install the drivers again and everything should have been smooth). Well it was installed and I powered the box up. The machine turned on and there was no video, I knew imediatley something was wrong, I dove for the power plug and yanked it out of the back of the machine. I slid the side panel off and popped out the card. The Heatsink was HOT VERY VERY HOT! I examined the solderspots and found something terrible. On the way to my friends place I must have hit the wrong bump in the road because the wire connected to the VGPU voltage regulator leg had somehow gotten pulled off the board. The leg was still connected to the chip and the wire so all it needed was to be soldered down. I went back home to attempt surgery on my board. I heated up the iron and prepared for the worst. I gently pushed the pin back down into place (we are talking like 2 millimeters) and SNAP! the leg came off the chip. I have since tried repeatdly to solder the leg back on but had no luck.
The card has now become a spare parts card. It has since been used to save a 9800, which is a whole other story. If anyone cares to hear that story I will gladly tell it. Its a pretty good one too.
