A Closer Look
The XTC700 comes out of the box with both fans pre-installed, as well as the top panel cover. You will most likely need to remove the fans to install the cooler though. First impressions go a long way, and without a doubt this is a fine looking cooler, and it has a nice heavy weight and feels very sturdy. The fan design looks stunning too, with a glossy black finish that are sure to look great in any system.
The side of the cooling tower shows us that the sides are closed off, ensuring the maximum amount of airflow goes from front to back and doesn’t spill out, keeping the air pressure up inside the cooler. You can see that there are two banks of fins, with a staggered system so the air takes and over-under pattern through the cooler, helping shift even more heat from the fins.
The fans are mounted in a push/pull configuration, and you could easily take the fans off and change their orientation to suit the airflow direction for your chassis, as they’re mounted on metal clips. You could even install your own fans if you so desired.
The top panel looks awesome, even while it’s powered off. It has an RGB-lit Xtreme Gaming logo in the middle, as well as some lovely orange highlights, which would match up nicely with some of the high-end Gigabyte motherboards.
While this does look great, it also helps tidy up the design and covers the tops of the heat pipes that come out of the top of the cooling tower.
The heat pipes themselves are huge, clocking in at 10mm each, the three pipes pass through both sides of the cooler in a “U” shape and make direct contact with the CPU.
The top panel can easily be removed, and behind it you’ll see the heat pipes at the top of the cooler.
While on the other side, a small PCB which connects the lighting, as well as the fans in a neat and tidy fashion.
Many PC enthusiasts are starting to understand that AIO / CLCs have a lot of negatives and few positive. A quality HSF offers incomparable reliability and almost silent cooling with a well engineered tower style cooler. These high end tower coolers not only perform better than similar priced or even more expensive AIO / CLCs, the tower coolers are often more quiet and they never leak coolant to damage mobos, GPUs and other hardware. This Gigabyte HSF is on the top of my list for a new Ryzen 7 1800X AM4 build.