The Xigmatek Thor's Hammer S126384

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My first impressions of this cooler is that Xigmatek has broken the stereotypical rectangular shaped mould of tower coolers. They have taken time to engineer a unique layout and design of the fins on the Thor's Hammer and here is the result of their time and effort. Thor's Hammer has dual layered heat-pipes, found right on top of each other. Heat then travels into the fins which have an alternating design and shape.

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The top of the Thor's Hammer gives a better idea of the fins shape with this cooler. You can see that the fans mount into wing-like fins, while the inner fins are more oval and aren't two pieced. Worth mentioning also is the black nickel plating's mirror-like shine and reflectivity.

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From this angle the staggering of the fins is even more apparent. Xigmatek layered their cooler with two wing-like fins, then altering to the one complete fin. Rinse and repeat until you get to the top of the cooler. There is a good view of the first four, or outer heat-pipes. These do the initial and majority of the heat transfer.

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The workhorses of the Thor's Hammer are these four flat, milled, 8mm heat-pipes. Again, unlike the predecessors, Thor's Hammer has the base milled level with the heat-pipes and this should decrease the amount of TIM needed to apply these coolers, as did the older versions.

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I had to get an image to show specifically what all this "dual layered heat-pipes" business is all about. Xigmatek has the usual suspect lined up on the outside to take care of removing the majority of the heat load from the CPU. They then take that a step further with the addition of a second grouping of heat-pipes soldered into the base. This allows a second chance to eliminate residual heat that the bases usually retain on other coolers. They haven't left out the AMD crowd and as you can see Thor's Hammer has the slots to use the cross bar lock down mechanism as well. The aluminium bit above the base only continues to transfer heat to the smallest three fins of the base, then, it is up to the fans to do their job.

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Strapping on one 120mm Yate Loon, 88CFM fan leaves the cooler looking like this. The fans are simple to install with Xigmatek's rubber anti-vibration fan mounts.

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Here we have a look at the two fan configuration. This version of setting up the Thor's Hammer makes it 144mm wide from fan edge to fan edge.

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One last look at the Thor's Hammer as it would appear in your case with the dual fan configuration.