Design and Functionality

The new cooler has quite an impressive appearance when put together:

With the fan installed it measures 120x80x159mm at a total of 600g of weight.

This seems to be a rather unremarkable design:

A large number of aluminum, almost square, ribs hang on three copper heat pipes. The ribs are curved in on both sides and meet each other partially to make the cooler more rigid.

The ends of the heat pipes are neatly soldered up at the top of the heatsink.

So, everything seems to be typical for a tower-like cooler if it were not for two special features. First, the diameter of the pipes is 8 instead of 6 millimeters. Second, the cooler features Heat-pipe Direct Touch technology for direct contact between the heat pipes and the CPU heat-spreader.

I have tested such tower-like coolers before, but I’ve never seen a cooler with 8mm pipes, direct contact, and with a heatsink for a 120mm fan. In other words, the HDT-S1283 is free from two common drawbacks of other coolers: it has a larger area of contact with the base and a larger heat dissipation area of the heatsink. This is just what the Ice Hammer IH-4050 HP and Xigmatek HDT-S963 needed. Running a little ahead, I should confess both innovations proved their worth.

The cooler’s base is flat, but without traces of polishing.

Note that the pipes are placed at a smaller distance from each other than in the Xigmatek HDT-S963, which should affect the transfer of heat positively.

The cooler comes with a 120mm 7-blade fan with a 4-pin connector:

The fan is marked as “AD1212HX-A7BGL”. Its speed can be varied by means of pulse-width modulation or with the included adapter. The adjustment range is 1000-2200rpm at 20-32dBA of noise. The fan creates airflow of 72.1 to 99.6CFM but the first number is dubious as a 120x25mm fan can hardly do 72.1CFM that at 1000rpm.

The fan is fastened using special grooves in the heatsink. You insert rubber compensators into the fan and then into those grooves.

This reduces vibrations and noise. Moreover, there is a gap (about 3mm in the narrowest point) between the fan and the heatsink – coupled with the concavity of the heatsink on the fan side, this reduces resistance to airflow and puts the latter to better use.