Performance
Stock performance on the cooler isn’t anything fancy, it’s quite high up our list actually at only five spots from the top. However, the temps are still perfectly fine, we’re barely pushing it here and it’ll run great all day long.
Dialling up the heat, the XTC700 did better, outperforming the Alphenfohn ATLAS, and keeping up with the Cryorig H5, but what’s really impressive here is the idle temps, which is pretty darn low for an overclocked CPU. I suspect the XTC700 could do with having its fan curves tweaking a bit for optimal performance, but that’s up to you how you want to balance cooling and acoustic performance.
At 39dBa the XTC700 is pretty quiet, rocking a fairly average acoustic performance, but still whisper quiet at stock clocks; you’re unlikely to ever hear it at this level while it’s in a chassis.
Pushing up the heat had the fans spinning a little harder, taking the noise up to 43dBa at full load, but that’s still pretty respectable and I would feel comfortable pushing it a bit harder for some extra cooling performance.
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.