Xigmatek SD1283 Dark Knight Night Hawk Edition CPU Cooler

Some notable takeaways. This is a i7 950 processor that runs stock @ 3.06GHz enveloped by a 130W TDP. The Night Hawk edition cooler easily handles the loads this CPU meets under stock conditions. Load it up under stock conditions, and there will be no worries. This cooler can handle it.

Now, we bump up the heat a bit be overclocking the CPU past 4GHz (4.032GHz) and we see this cooler getting taxed. Not overwhelmed though. To put it in comparison, we have seen similar performance before, on a cooler that costs around $75-$85 dollars. So, thermally speaking, this cooler is on par (performance wise) with some larger, more expensive coolers. The difference here though is that this heat sink costs much less! What do you give up when you go to this cooler vs one of the larger units? Silence. When this cooler was pushed, and the fan responded, it was the loudest piece of the system. Not the PSU, not the video card fan, not the system fan, the heat sink fan. When the fan ramped up, the sound was more of a turbulence sound. Might have been the air passing over the ceramic fins (not a totally smooth path), or the fan pushing air into the cooler fins, or fan tips in relation to the surface of the fins… I don’t know. But it was noticeable from 1 room away. stopping the fan momentarily, I could significantly notice the difference in the noise profile. Some people this will not bother, as you may already have other fans in your case that are potentially louder than this one. But if you are wanting silent computing, and you load up your CPU… you will hear this stock fan. Whisper quiet, it is not. If silence is your goal, look into experimenting with other fans. Fan whine is not transferred to the heat sink due to the rubber insulating fan mounts. This isolates the fan hum/vibration from being amplified by the cooler. So, the noise I heard is fan only, and only when the fan is rolled up to max. 

The Xigmatek SD1283 Dark Knight-Night Hawk edition cooler is a proven heat siphon. It’s unique deep black, ceramic coating allows for it to visually stand apart from other heat sinks on the market, and it’s mounting bracket system gives an attractive accent to the black finish. You would think that a 3x8mm heat pipe solution would not be enough to keep overclocking stable, but the numbers bear out otherwise. The fan is adequate for the performance of the unit, however it does get loud and add to the sound profile of the computer. Also, due to the base height of this unit, it could interfere with a memory DIMM slot, if that slot is too close to the CPU socket, or the memory you are using is taller than average units.