Dark Knight (S1283)

Finally, the third and the last cooler we are going to discuss today has a very remarkable name: XIGMATEK Dark Knight, just like the last Batman movie with Christian Bale. The box for this cooler is designed in dark colors with a knight sword on the front:

There is a polyurethane foam casing inside the cardboard box that holds the cooler securely and protects against possible transportation damage. The cooler is bundled with an LGA775 backplate, two retention brackets with screws for the same platform, five silicon spindles for the fan, a swing-clip for AMD processors, Stars thermal interface and installation manual:

I think XIGMATEK Dark Knight is one of the most beautiful processor coolers out there. A fully-nickel-plated tower with a dark semi-transparent fan creates inimitable mood and stresses the serious intentions of the “Dark Knight”:

By the way, the manufacturer specifically points out on their web-site that “Black Nickel causes a very gentle but also noble image, which also increases cooling performance.” However, from my conversations with other cooling solution manufacturers I learned that nickel-plated heatsink samples would usually be about 4°C less efficient on average, than the same exact heatsinks without the nickel layer.

The cooler design is fairly simple. There is a heatsink made of 54 aluminum plates, each 0.45mm thick that are spaced out at 2mm from one another. These plates sit on three copper heatpipes, each 8mm in diameter:

The heatsink measures 120 x 50 x 159 mm and its calculated effective surface area is 5,539sq.cm.

Just like by other two coolers we have just discussed, the heatpipes of XIGMATEK Dark Knight form part of the cooler base. It comes covered with a protective plastic film: