X-bit labs

XIGMATEK HDT-D1284 and Scythe ZIPANG: New Processor Coolers Reviewed (page 5)

Category: Coolers

by Sergey Lepilov

[ 03/11/2008 | 08:46 PM ]

Installation Tips

The installation procedure is extremely simple. On AMD K8 platforms XIGMATEK HDT-D1284 is fastened with a metal “sling”-clip that can be inserted between the heatpipes or perpendicular to them:

There are four slits cut into the aluminum cooler base specifically for that. This way XIGMATEK engineers made sure that their cooler is free from a drawback typical of many cooling solutions out there: limited positioning choices on Socket 754/939/940/AM2 platforms. Now XIGMATEK HDT-D1284 may be installed facing in any direction to achieve maximum convenience and cooling efficiency.

In case the cooler needs to be installed onto an LGA775 mainboard, the positioning choice is not an issue to begin with. That is why all you need to do is screw on the appropriate retention to the cooler base:

And then you simply install the cooler onto the mainboard by pushing the plastic clips into the retention holes around the processor socket. Although, I would strongly recommend doing it only after the mainboard has been removed from the system case. Otherwise, when the mainboard is inside the case, you will not be able to push the spindles into the holes really hard, as they are underneath the heatsink. Therefore it is pretty tricky to reach them, and in our case it was simply impossible to do at all:

You can easily notice that I installed the cooler with the heatpipe ends facing upwards. Despite pretty large cooler size of 145 x 150 x 134mm, the heatsink as well as the curved heatpipes didn’t hit against any components in the around-the-socket area. Moreover, even if we rotate XIGMATEK HDT-D1284 90 degrees counterclockwise, the heatpipes still won’t prevent you from installing memory modules with tall heat-spreaders, not to mention regular memory modules:

It is interesting that when XIGMATEK HDT-D1284 is installed with its heatpipes facing particularly this way as in the picture above, it didn’t transfer the heat from the CPU as efficiently as we had expected reporting the exact same monitoring graph every single time and reporting an error after a minute into the test:

We did check the contact between the cooler base and the CPU heat-spreader multiple times using our thermal compound imprint method:

However, it proved that the problem lies specifically with the heatpipes positioning, because once we moved the cooler with its heatpipes facing upwards, the thermals got back to normal and all tests were a pass without any problems. To tell the truth, this is pretty strange because we haven’t seen anything like that during our previous tests of similarly designed cooling solutions. Besides, the heatpipe performance doesn’t really depend on its positioning. In case of XIGMATEK HDT-D1284, we have double-checked and confirmed the direct dependence of the cooler efficiency on the heatpipes positioning. Maybe the elbow curve or larger heatpipes diameter (8mm instead of the standard 6mm) or even the heatpipes direct touch technology affects the results… Of course, it would be interesting to see if the same dependency occurs by other samples of the same cooler, but unfortunately, we do not have the chance to check it out yet, because we only have got one sample at hand.

In conclusion to our discussion of the new XIGMATEK HDT-D1284 cooler we have to add that its recommended retail price is set at $48.