Heatsink Construction & Design

On first impression this looks like your average run of the mill 3 heatpipe tower style cooler which everyone and their dog makes nowadays. As with most others the three pipes line up in a row and start at the top right corner, go down the base, across the base and then back up to the top left side. Also, just like other coolers we have seen in the past, two heatpipes go one way (left to right) and the odd man out so to speak goes the opposite way (right to left); or at least this is the way a normal 3 heatpipe tower cooler goes. With this one things seem normal until those heatpipes hit the base since they go through the base but with this bad boy they are the base of the unit. While calling it the base of the unit is a little bit over melodramatic and technically incorrect the flattened heatpipes do make up a good portion of said base. In between the heatpipes you have small aluminum strips that keep the heatpipes straight and give the base some much needed strength. An easier way to imagine this setup is to imagine a normal base and then cut three deep gouges into it and fill these new valleys with heatpipes.


The beauty of this design is in the fact that heatpipes transfer thermal energy from their “hot” end (or in this case middle) to the cool end(s) via boiling a liquid contained inside them which then condense back to a liquid when it cools at the “cool end(s)”. By placing the all copper heatpipes directly over the CPU there is no need to first heat a copper (or aluminum) base which in turn would heat the heatpipes. This dramatically decreases the thermal resistance the Xigmatek cooler has.

A really easy way to imagine how this setup improves cooling is to imagine a hot stove. Now on that stove place a big aluminum frying pan, and then place a pot of water into that pan to boil the water. Now, imagine that hot burner but this time put your pot of water directly on it instead of on the frying pan. Needless to say your water will boil an awful lot quicker in scenario 2 than 1 and the same holds true for CPU cooling solutions where your “water” is the low boiling fluid inside the heatpipes.


Besides its obviously different design there was another thing about the base which stands out and this was the base itself is not what you call polished to a mirror shine. It is perfectly flat (if you take the fact that it is not a homogenous surface out of the equation) but there are a lot of major and minor tooling marks present. When compared to a comparably priced standard base this level of finishing is a below average but as this is a totally new and different design you can’t really call it “below average” as it is the only one in its class we have tested to date.


Besides this amazingly innovative base the unit really is a normal tower cooler. It weighs 600 grams just like many moderate size tower coolers and is 120mm wide, 159mm high with a svelte 50mm deep. It even has an average amount of aluminum fins (54 to be precise) that give a nice large surface area to distribute the heat from the heatpipes. As with many tower coolers these fins are very thin and tightly packed. This of course allows Xigmatek to cram more cooling surface area into a relatively small package, but of course this increases the static pressure of the cooler and this in turn demands a high performance fan be used. This is par for the course as they say and hopefully Xigmatek didn’t make a rookie mistake to stick a cheesy fan on this unit.