Design and Functionality

XILENCE Black Hawk COPPER is a classical top-cooler with the airflow directed towards the mainboard PCB. Although it doesn’t have any sophisticated traits that are pretty popular these days, it looks very beautiful. I would even say “juicy”:

A solid copper heatsink consists of 56 plates pierced by six copper heatpipes, each 6 mm in diameter, which come out of the copper base. The cooler measures 154.5x143x143.5 mm and weighs 1225 g. The cooler is subjectively very heavy, although this weight is no record in the field. For example, copper Thermalright TRUE and Scythe Mugen 2 modifications weigh around 2 kg.

There is a frameless fan attached to the heatsink that sends a flow of air in-between the heatsink plates:

The plates are 0.4 mm thick and are spaced out at 2 mm from one another. The calculated heatsink effective surface is 4810 cm², which is kind of average even for top-coolers (for example, Thermalright AXP-140 has effective heatsink surface area of 4787 cm² and Scythe Kabuto – 7057 cm²).

Actually, the new XILENCE cooler looks very similar to the legendary Thermaltake Big Typhoon 120 with that only difference that all its six heatpipes come out of the same side of the base plate (not in groups of three in each direction) and the heatsink plates are shaped differently. The heatpipes are soldered to the heatsink plates.

The heatpipes are slightly bent away from the center of the heatsink and find themselves in the fan airflow zones. The ends of the heatpipes are topped with shaped caps. At the cooler base the heatpipes are placed in special grooves and are soldered to them:

The thinnest part of the base plate below the heatpipes is 3.5 mm. Despite pretty large base surface, it is very even:

 The finish quality of the base plate is impeccable:

Of course, on an even surface like that the thermal compound imprint from the processor heat-spreader turned out perfect.

As we have already mentioned before, the fan is attached using a plastic frame with an X-shaped cover:

According to the cooler specifications, the fan is 120x120x48 mm, but the height is listed for the fan and the retention frame. The fan itself is only 38 mm tall. The fan rotation speed is PWM controlled in the interval from 300 to 1800 RPM. The maximum airflow created by this fan is 78.31 CFM. There was no mention of the fan static pressure in the official specs, although this parameter is extremely important for coolers with very dense heatsink plate arrays. The fan uses a fluid dynamic bearing with unspecified MTBF.

The fan clips on to the heatsink with four latches along two sides of the frame. There are four silicone mounts inserted into the four corners of the frame:

In other words, the frame panels holding the fan do not touch the heatsink at all, but hand on these shock-absorbing silicone mounts. This allowed the designers to lower the level of noise from the fan compared with what would be generated by the fans directly contacting with the cooler heatsink.