Xigmatek Thor's Hammer heatsink

PC COMPONENTS HOUSE Xigmatek has established its brand as one of the better known ones among the high-end crowd when it comes to heatsinks, cases and such. Its recent heatsink line has direct heat-pipe touch on the CPU heat spreader, allegedly enabling more efficient heat transfer. The large, sleek black Thor's Hammer heatsink is the cream of the crop - it has four direct heat-pipe contacts in the lower layer, plus three more heat pipes above. You can also mount fans on both sides of the Thor's Hammer heatsink for 'push-pull' accelerated airflow.

Here we have a quick look at it on the Gigabyte GA X58A-UD7 high-end mainboard using Intel's Xeon W3580 - the workstation variant of the Core i7 975XE - and with trusty Kingston HyperX DDR3-2000 RAM, all 12GB of it. I've benchmarked this configuration many times before using the high-end, famed Coolermaster V8, so we'll see how the two compare.

The X58A-UD7 is Gigabyte's top end X58 mainboard, too. It has four PCIe x16 slots, a 24+2+2 phase power system with great overclocking potential, not to mention native USB3 with extra power drive, and SATA3 hanging directly off the spare North Bridge PCIe V2 lanes without sacrificing the graphics PCIe workload. With the W3580, rumoured to be of even better bins when it comes to overclocking than the 975XE, hitting 4.27GHz was not a problem. The Kingston memory kept running with 6-6-6-16 latency settings at DDR3-1600 speed, T1 with all six DIMMs populated. Now, what about the temperatures?

With the BIOS set at the default 3.33GHz frequency and 1.2V vCPU, the 37C temperature was the same for both the Thor and V8 in the BIOS hardware monitor. When running Sandra CPU benchmarks, the top spike was 67C on the V8 and 65C on the Thor, just a notch better, probably due to the direct heat-pipe contact, I believe. At 4GHz and 1.32V vCPU, the BIOS monitor temperatures were 42C and 43C for the V8 and Thor, respectively, while the Sandra temperatures peaked at 75C with the V8 and 74C with the Thor. So, a little smaller difference this time.

Note that the Thor heat-sink package comes without a fan. I borrowed a Xigmatek fan from another HSF unit, but otherwise you've got to source your own suitable fan or two based on your own speed and noise preferences.

Price-wise, you can get the Thor for a similar price as the CoolerMaster V8 - around $60, €45, or £50, depending on added VAT and where you are. Yes, if you're in Blighty it's a little more expensive.

In Short
In summary, Thor's Hammer performed well against the Coolermaster V8, even though it has one heat-pipe less than the Coolermaster. But there's no decisive winner there. Things like thermal paste choice and how well you mount the heatsink can affect these few degrees centigrade temperature reading differences, too. The installation process is similar on both models, as well. However, the Xigmatec Thor's Hammer enables dual fan operation and makes fan replacement far easier. Finally, looks-wise, Thor's Hammer definitely wins. µ

The Good
Good looks, good performance, direct heat pipe contact to the CPU heat spreader.

The Bad
Large size, and you need to use the provided tools to tighten the heatsink mounting screws.

The Ugly
Air cooling heatsink fan systems really can't go much further in performance.

Beers
9/10