Final Thoughts
Pricing
Unfortunately, at the time of writing, we couldn’t find any retailers with stock or accurate pricing information, but we will push to update this as soon as the information becomes available to us.
Overview
Gigabyte isn’t really a big name when it comes to cooling, although it’s not really their first time, given they’ve created some pretty crazy water-cooled hardware in the past. A lot of love and attention has gone into the build quality of the XTC 700, with their high-performance and durable fans, the incredibly durable and thick heat pipe design, and the robust cooling tower. It looks and feels like a premium quality product that’s sure to last a long time. The addition of incredible aesthetics is a big win for any system builder too, with that lovely top panel cover that features customisable RGB lighting that’s sure to leave a smile on your face.
While I do love this cooler, it’s far from perfect and I think Gigabyte can make it even better if they aim to make a version 2 in the future. The mounting kit is far more complicated than it needs to be for a tower air cooler. A few minor changes to how the fans are mounted, a more user-friendly universal backplate, and a top cover that’s not such a bugger to clip back into place would go a long way to improving the user experience here.
The performance isn’t as great as I hoped, although it’s far from bad. The XTC 700 does a decent job of running on an overclocked CPU, and it’s not too noisy while doing so. I think the fan curve could be tweaked a little to ease off at low loads and work a little harder in the mid-to-high temp ranges for even better performance, but this is something you could easily do yourself in BIOS or software to suit your needs.
Not being able to see stock or pricing is a letdown, but we hope to see it being reflective of the performance, and a competitive price could help keep the XTC 700 competitive in a market that already has a lot of great coolers available to the consumer.
Pros
- Stylish aesthetics
- RGB lighting
- Good RAM clearance
- Durable build quality
- Well known brand name
Cons
- Tricky to install
- Limited availability
- Couldn’t find price information
“Great build quality and a unique design make the Gigabyte XTC 700 stand out from the crowd. With the addition of RGB lighting on the top, it’s certainly unique, and offers reliable mid-range performance even on a heavily overclocked CPU.”
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.