Xigmatek Thor’s Hammer CPU Cooler Review

A Closer Look
This CPU cooler has a striking appearance that is able to blend into any chassis or colour scheme you like thanks to it’s reflective black nickel coating. Despite it’s stunning and unique design the cooler remains very professional and will look great in the more refined Lian Li cases all the way to cases such as the aggressive HAF-X. It really stands out as the vocal point of a system while remaining professional and slightly aggressive in appearance with its sharp angles along the side. Pictures can never do a reflective surface justice, and this is no exception. However using a dark background makes it resemble how it looks in the flesh a lot better:

Looking at the front we can see that this cooler uses a very intricate system of overlapping fins that are designed to provide a good surface area and airflow. The fin arrangement has an aggressive look to it and when handling the cooler the build quality speaks for itself. The thick fins feel unbendable and show no signs of movement whatsoever. When handling it, you will also notice that this is a monster of a cooler, weighing in at 750g and towering 160mm tall this is certainly not for SFF builds. Be careful when handling your PC with this cooler installed as the weight may damage the motherboard if shaken too much. Despite it’s size it will still fit in most mid tower cases and it did not interfere with any of the DIMM slots on the motherboard.

The top of the cooler is the centrepiece of any CPU cooler, as it is the part you see more than any other in a windowed case. The Thor’s Hammer does not fail to disappoint when it comes to delivering this aesthetic touch. Many coolers designed to look nice often sprawl text or images across the top which often look nice, but are far from subtle or professional. Others go for a shrouded finish like the Coolermaster V8 which again look nice, but are unprofessional and often sacrifice quality for aesthetics. The Thor’s Hammer however, displays itself with a very subtle but beautiful top. It simply has an arrangement of two fins shaped in a pleasing design, and finished with the black nickel on the rest of the cooler. No image can do this justice and it does look absolutely fantastic and will reflect the colour of any LEDs or CCFLs in your case.

The base of this cooler is the business end, and is where it utilises a unique dual layer direct contact heatpipe system. This is a fantastic system so bear with my while I explain it. As you can see from the picture, instead of using a traditional base, the heatpipes are going to make direct contact with the CPU, which is nothing new.

We have seen many heatpipe direct touch (HDT) coolers on the market which often yield better performance for price, but from my experience, they have their limitations. The main limitation is the number of heatpipes, if more than about 4 are used, then the base will be bigger than the CPU so will be doing nothing.

What Xigmatek has done is combine the performance of the HDT’s with extra heatpipes built into a base to beat the limitations of traditional HDT coolers. The way they have done this is by leaving a small gap between the 4x 8mm heatpipes which allows the base to make contact too. They then added 3x 6mm heatpipes into the base which will assist in removing heat from the CPU and base area as quickly as possible. This is known as dual layer HDT technology and seems to be very effective!